Queen Of The Boulevard -- Showy Role In `Sunset Boulevard' Puts Glenn Close Where She's Most Comfortable: In The Driver's Seat

OS ANGELES - After all the hosannas and standing ovations from le tout Hollywood, one might think Glenn Close was born to rule "Sunset Boulevard" - a grand dame in gold lame, ostrich feathers and enough rhinestone jewelry so she rattles like a chandelier.

Last December she took Los Angeles by storm in the American premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical remake of Billy Wilder's film classic. Now, she is poised to do the same on Broadway in November. Eight years after the porcelain-skinned blonde goosed the nation's zeitgeist as witchy Alex Forrest in "Fatal Attraction," Close has grasped a new brass ring. "A signature role," as she puts it. At last.

Unlike many of her peers, who have discovered middle age to be something of a wasteland when it comes to film offers, Close, 47, has retained her audience by nurturing an active theater career and by accepting almost any role that strikes her fancy.

"I don't wait around for major roles that movies revolve around," she says. "If it's a five-day role or just four scenes, I don't care, just so long as it's interesting."

In her two latest films "The House of the Spirits," based on Isabel Allende's epic novel, and "The Paper," director Ron Howard's comedy, Close portrays another pair of steely, if temperamentally different women-to-be-reckoned-with. "

"Glenn has intelligence, beauty, sexuality and a kind of don't-mess-with-me strength," says Howard, who sought out Close to play the sophisticated, difficult managing editor in "The Paper." "There aren't many actresses who have all that and can convey it in a glance."

Role of a lifetime

Yet none of her film roles had fully tapped those characteristics. If Close felt her resume lacked that single career-defining performance - despite five Oscar nominations, an Emmy nomination, and two Tony awards - she has found it playing Norma Desmond in "Sunset Boulevard."

"At certain points of my career I've been bored with myself," says Close. "I wanted something that would really throw me out there and demand a size of performance that you really can't give in movies but can only get in a role like this or one of the great theater classics.

"I just wanted to go out there and open myself up, fling myself open."

Like Bette Davis whom she admires because "she never asked for an audience's sympathies," Close keeps a distance about her. Although there is nothing formal about her demeanor, she is slightly standoffish as if she is always aware of her position. And yours.

When something doesn't please her - questions about her upbringing on her family's 500-acre estate in Greenwich, Conn., references to John Starke, who fathered her daughter but from whom she is estranged, even an innocuous remark about Tonya Harding - Close wrinkles her nose and gives a little shake of her head as if offended. She dismisses the controversy regarding her replacement of Patti Lupone, the original star of the London production of "Sunset Boulevard" who had been scheduled to open the musical on Broadway.

"I never felt that I was stepping into someone else's role," she says evenly. "But for something that might be the signature role of my career, I thought I should probably do it."

Yet, she retains vivid memories of the less-than-flattering reviews for her own last Broadway appearance in "Death and the Maiden" that won her a second Tony.

"I can't take it, my system can't take it," she says. "When you're working that hard it would help to have had a little support from the critics."

She seems most sensitive to being judged. When the observation is made that her career - she didn't begin college until the age of 22, after six years of performing with the conservative group, "Up with People," did not land her first film role until 36, and only found the richest role of her career, Norma Desmond, at 46 - seems as much due to her forceful personality as her talents, she insists "you are talking to someone who is just very privileged."

Two distinct cultures

Close seems to embody two distinct cultures. She's the blue-blooded, William and Mary educated granddaughter of a wealthy industrialist. She's also the cackling, slightly exhibitionistic roadhouse performer who bore her daughter out of wedlock, engaged in rather public affairs (with actor Woody Harrelson and hockey star Cam Neely) and who once mooned a Hollywood restaurant full of patrons.

There is about Close a fierce independence. "I'm finally the head of my own compound," she says about her life now.

For all her success and visibility, and in the year in which she found not only the richest role of her career but also a measure of personal happiness (after two failed marriages, numerous affairs and the breakup with Starke, Close is now in a new relationship), she has had no one to rely on but herself. "I've learned everything the hard way," she says, adding, that she still considers herself "an outsider" when it comes to Hollywood.

"I still feel that in some ways," she says, "that people really don't know what to do with me.

"But I've matured to the point where it doesn't bother me. I can only make my choices for very personal reasons. . . . I do think that I've come to the point that I know a lot of my craft, that my instincts are pretty good and that I've earned the respect of my peers and that's all very gratifying.

"I still have this Yankee ethic that says you don't rest on laurels, that you're not even supposed to think about laurels, but sometimes it helps if you just accept yourself."

Role written for a man

Close went into rehearsals for "Sunset Boulevard" right after shooting "The Paper" last summer.

Playing the role of Alicia Clark, the no-nonsense managing editor of "The Sun," a fictionalized New York tabloid in "The Paper," meant Close stepped into a role that had originally been written for a man.

"The first thing she said to me was `Don't change too much,' " recalls Howard, who cast Close after deciding the role would become more poignant if played by a woman.

"Glenn doesn't pull power plays and she doesn't wrangle for leverage but she does make suggestions," says Howard. "But she does it in the most positive spirit and she's got the smarts to help you. She always has a global view of the story so she's not the kind of actress whose eyes glaze over when you try to explain something to her."

Of her character Alicia Clark, Close says, "She's a bitch. I love it. It made my choices very simple."

That kind of risk-taking, says Howard, is what distinguishes Close from most of her peers. "Glenn has a tremendous amount of courage because she takes unsympathetic women and makes them complex, interesting people that audiences can empathize with."

It is the same kind of daring Close brought to her role of Ferula in "The House of the Spirits," based on Allende's epic novel about several generations of a family living in a fictional South American country. She initially had been cast by director Bille August to play the role of Clara, the psychic earth mother and main protagonist, opposite William Hurt in an earlier incarnation of the film five years ago.

However, when filming began last year, August had recast the principals with actors Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons, and Close was asked to play the far less glamorous role of Ferula, the repressed spinsterish sister, "a very Catholic woman who's sacrificed her life to take care of her mother," says Close.

"She has the same energy and sexuality as her brother, but instead of going out and raping people, she has to wear a corset and go to confession."

Close sees the film, which has been drubbed by many critics, as being about "these women who have this mystical connection to each other that men can never be a part of."

Next project similar

It is a theme Close will explore further in her next project, a TV movie about Margarethe Cammermyer, the former Army colonel who was forced out of the Washington National Guard after disclosing she was a lesbian. Cammermyer was "the military's highest ranking officer to be thrown out because of homosexuality," says Close, who will co-produce the film with Barbra Streisand.

Although she concedes that like Tom Hanks' portrayal of a gay man with AIDS in "Philadelphia," it is something of a risk to play a lesbian on network television, "I think the country is ready for this," Close says. "This is a chance to portray a human being who happens to be a homosexual. I think it is rather groundbreaking."

Indeed, despite what she says is her agent's discouragement of her appearing on television, and her own preference for working in theater, Close remains interested in working in all mediums.

"It's the roles that appeal to you and I believe if the material is good it doesn't matter where it is," she says.

"Whether a movie or a play, Norma Desmond is one of the great creations, exactly the kind of character I love to play," says Close. "She's tragic, deluded, pathetic . . . it's like classic theater watching somebody's fall. And unfortunately I have this mechanism in me that says `Gotta do it.' " (Copyright 1994, Hilary de Vries. Dist. by Los Angeles Times Syndicate.)