Why Glenn Close got fired from the first leading role of her career
It’s quite likely that at some point in your life, you’ve heard someone use the phrase ‘bunny boiler’, but do you know where it comes from? No, it’s not a fancy new technique for cooking rabbit sous vide, but it is, in fact, a reference to the 1987 movie Fatal Attraction starring Glenn Close, in which she dispatches a family pet in a particularly culinary fashion due to being very, very angry indeed.
Now, there are some movies made in the 1980s that really could not have been made in any other decade, The Secret of My Success and Wall Street, to name but two, but Fatal Attraction is just unbelievably 1980s. From the font on the movie poster to the soundtrack to the perms to the shoulder pads to the fact of Michael Douglas, it’s all massive cellphones and enormous suburban houses and works fantastically.
But the star of the show is Close without a shadow of doubt, managing to be simultaneously unhinged, smiling, seductive and simmering with quiet rage all at the same time as she takes the idea of ‘hell hath no fury’ and runs amok with it, terrorising the philandering Douglas, and his family, and his pets all the way to a chaotically violent end.
Close was rightly Oscar-nominated for her performance in the film, one of eight Academy Award nominations she’s picked up in a 40-year career, although mystifyingly, she has never won one. In fact, she collected her first nomination from her debut film, The World According to Garp, a 1982 movie co-starring Robin Williams, adapted from the novel by John Irving.
She repeated the feat a year later in her next film, earning a ‘Best Supporting Actress’ nod for the comedy-drama The Big Chill, directed by The Empire Strikes Back writer Lawrence Kasdan, and then, in 1984, she made it three in a row when she was nominated for the Robert Redford movie The Natural, also starring Robert Duvall and Kim Basinger.
However, she very nearly didn’t make it onto the film at all, because she was slated to appear in her first leading role in a period drama called The Bostonians starring Superman’s Christopher Reeve, explaining to Vanity Fair that Redford attempted to convince her that she could do both movies, saying: “I had already been cast in The Bostonians when Bob [Redford] asked me to come and see him. It was during the negotiations of trying to make it work for me to do both that [The Bostonians producer] Ismail Merchant said, ‘She’s fired’. So, I did The Natural and loved it.”
Ironically, The Bostonians also achieved two Academy Award nominations, including one for British actress Vanessa Redgrave, but Close never regretted working with Redford on The Natural, wherein that same year she won a Tony award for her performance in The Real Thing, the Broadway play written by the late Tom Stoppard.
Over the next few decades, Close proved herself to be one of the finest actors in Hollywood history, with another five Oscar nominations, tying her with Peter O’Toole on a total of eight, three Emmy awards, three Tonys and three Golden Globe awards.
Most recently, this year she’s been appearing alongside Kim Kardashian in the controversial Ryan Murphy series All’s Fair and has a number of projects coming up in various states of readiness, including a role on the latest Hunger Games movie Sunrise on the Reaping and a rumoured remake of the Billy Wilder classic Sunset Boulevard.
