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Glenn Close is.... Albert Nobbs....

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Aloysius J. Gleek:





[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66N5hjkq740[/youtube]

Aloysius J. Gleek:


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/movies/glenn-close-as-a-man-in-albert-nobbs.html


The Heart That Beats
in Albert Nobbs
By DAVID ROONEY
Published: December 9, 2011


Glenn Close, left, on the set of her television show “Damages,” and right as the guesthouse
waiter Albert Nobbs in her new film.


MOST failed auditions are quickly forgotten. Rarely does one generate a part that haunts an actor for three decades, lingering like an unresolved relationship that refuses to be eclipsed by successes across film, theater and television. But a botched stab at the title role was the beginning of Glenn Close’s enduring fascination with “Albert Nobbs.”

The audition was for Manhattan Theater Club’s 1982 Off Broadway production of “The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs.” Adapted by the French playwright and director Simone Benmussa from the George Moore story of that name, the play was a minimalist retelling of the lonely existence of a woman in 19th-century Ireland passing as a male servant in order to survive.

Ms. Close’s theater credits at that time included a Tony-nominated role in the musical “Barnum, ” and she was awaiting the release of her feature-film debut, “The World According to Garp,” which would bring her the first of five Oscar nominations. She was not yet the major screen name known for “The Big Chill,” “Fatal Attraction” and “Dangerous Liaisons.” Her three Tonys and three Emmys (the most recent for “Damages”) were still to come. So the audition was no fait accompli.

“I was never a very good auditioner,” Ms. Close, 64, confessed over a recent Sunday brunch at August, a restaurant near her West Village home. “I went in and read, and in the middle of the audition I said: ‘I’m boring myself, so I must be boring you. I think I’m going to go home.’ I just knew I wasn’t hitting it.”

“That evening I heard from my agent that they thought it was the most interesting thing that had happened that day,” she continued. “They asked me to go back. I remember thinking how sick and tired I was of being bad at auditions, and that I really wanted this part.”

Ms. Close called her friend Kevin Kline, who recommended the acting coach Harold Guskin. She made an appointment, gleaned a few practical tips to help unlock the character, dressed in something more appropriate to the role, then went back for a second audition and nailed it. Reviewing the play in The New York Times,  Mel Gussow called the performance transforming.

 “I always felt that if I could pull off Albert, there was nothing else I had to do because it brings into play everything I’ve learned as an actor — movement, costume, voice — just trying to create the inner life of someone who’s so silent,” Ms. Close said. “She’s an unfinished person.”

A film based on the play has been a longtime passion project for Ms. Close. “Albert Nobbs” is finally opening this month with Oscar-qualifying runs in New York and Los Angeles, followed by a national release Jan. 27. Ms. Close’s performance and that of her co-star Janet McTeer drew major plaudits at festivals this fall, landing them on the radar of awards-season handicappers.

In many recent screen portrayals of women passing as men, the gender reversal has been tethered to a stylistic device. In “Shakespeare in Love” it played into a rich history of cross-dressing theatricality. In “Orlando” it sprang from a fantastical literary conceit. In “Yentl” it occurred within the elastic framework of movie-musical reality. Elsewhere, as in “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Transamerica,” the switch was grounded in subject matter that directly addresses sexual identity from a contemporary perspective.

“Albert Nobbs” arguably has more in common with the current release “Tomboy,” a delicate French drama about a 10-year-old girl whose efforts to pass as a boy are driven less by sexual awareness than natural impulse. Standard definitions like transgender or lesbian don’t apply.

“Gender becomes almost irrelevant because it’s about human connection,” Ms. Close said. “The thing I’m most proud of in the movie is that you forget what you’re looking at.”

Directed by Rodrigo García, who had worked with Ms. Close on “Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her” and “Nine Lives,” the film is an ensemble drama set mainly in the Dublin guesthouse where Albert has worked for the past 17 years, her secret undetected. Her life of self-exile is opened to new possibilities after she is forced to share her room one night with Hubert, a brawny housepainter.

The revelation comes early on and is not treated as a surprise twist à la “The Crying Game,” so it’s no spoiler to reveal that Hubert is played by Ms. McTeer. Like Albert, Hubert is a woman living in disguise, but without the sense of fear or shame that grips the timorous butler. The similarities and differences between these women, both of whom have experienced poverty and abuse, form the central dynamic of “Albert Nobbs.”

“Albert had never lived as a woman,” Mr. García said in a phone interview. “So inside Nobbs was a girl so suppressed that all she could think was: ‘Hide and survive. Fade against the wall. Be invisible.’ The layers of self-erasure are humongous. But Hubert knows who she is and what she wants.”

Given the polar-opposite approaches to their characters’ camouflage, the actresses drew on vastly different inspirations for their physical characterizations.

“I wanted Hubert to be very working-class, very Irish,” said Ms McTeer, also speaking by phone. “A big, barrel-chested kind of Viking. So the people I looked to were my friends Brendan Gleeson” — who appears in the film — “and Liam Neeson.”

“Liam has this wonderful way that he stands on the back of his heels,” she continued. “He has a simplicity of movement that’s somehow very attractive. And Brendan is a very cheeky guy with a great sense of humor. I wanted all that.”

Ms. Close is a handsome woman whose natural warmth and poise bear little resemblance to the painfully shy figure on screen, with her downcast eyes and prosthetically altered wingnut ears. She said that one of her references was a photograph from a National Geographic  article about Albania’s “sworn virgins,” women designated to dress and live as men by families without male heirs. She also studied the sad-tramp circus clown Emmett Kelly and Charlie Chaplin, influences reflected in Albert’s baggy pants, splayed feet and elongated shoes.

“The trick with this material is you have to have a lightness of touch and a sense of comedy,” Ms. Close said. “I thought in the way she moves through the world that Albert had a comic side to her as well as tragic. She’s never been in the body or the clothes that really say who she is.”

Ms. Close, who is also a producer and screenwriter on “Albert Nobbs,” said she first began nurturing the film in earnest more than 15 years ago. She showed the material to a number of potential collaborators before finding a match in the Hungarian director Istvan Szabo, with whom she had made “Meeting Venus.” He wrote a treatment, and his script editor, Gabriella Prekop, completed a first draft; Ms. Close then brought in the distinguished author John Banville to “Irish-ize” it. But while plans were made to shoot the film in the early 2000s, with Mr. Szabo directing, financing failed to come together.

The project languished until Ms. Close took it in hand again around five years ago, undertaking a process she described as “culling it back” to find the elegance and simplicity, and bringing Mr. García on board.

“The psychological effect of finally doing ‘Albert Nobbs’ is a sense of joyous closure,” Ms. Close said. “I think the definition of an independent film is a film that almost doesn’t get made. But there came a point where I asked, ‘Am I willing to live the rest of my life having given up on this?’ And I said, ‘No I won’t. ’ ”

ifyoucantfixit:
    Just a personal comment.  I love her devinely.  She never, never fails to do a wonderful job.
 
  That poster is eerily compelling.  You cannot take your eyes off it.
  This seems to be a fine followup to "Sarah plain and Tall."

Aloysius J. Gleek:



http://www.ramascreen.com/albert-nobbs-set-photos-mia-wasikowska


Mia Wasikowska and Glenn Close


(....)


Aaron Johnson replaced Orlando Bloom to play the character Joe

Mia Wasikowska replaced Amanda Seyfried to play the character Helen.

Co-written by and starring Glenn Close, the film also co-stars Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and it’s directed by Rodrigo Garcia (Mother And Child )

Close who also produces, wrote the script with John Banville and Close will play “a woman in 19th century Ireland who disguises herself as a man in order to survive and work but whose deception leads her to an unusual love triangle.”

Based on the Off-Broadway play The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs,  which is based on the short story by George Moore.

Close starred as the lead in the stage version.

It’s described as Gosford Park  meets Boys Don’t Cry ..Here’s the current plot:
 

“19th century Ireland: a woman with no husband or family and without work would face a bleak life of poverty and loneliness. Albert, a shy butler who keeps himself to himself, has been hiding a deep secret for years – ‘he’ is a woman who has had to dress and behave as a man all her life in order to escape this fate. When handsome painter Hubert Page arrives at the hotel, Albert is inspired to try and escape the false life she has created for herself. She gathers her nerves to court beautiful, saucy young maid Helen in whom she thinks she’s found a soul-mate – but Helen’s eye is on a new arrival: handsome, bad-boy Joe, the new handy-man! As Albert dares to hope that she might one day live a normal life, we catch a glimpse of a free-spirited woman who is caught in the wrong time…”






http://mynewplaidpants.blogspot.com/2011/10/youve-got-my-attention-albert-nobbs.html

You've Got My Attention, Albert Nobbs
Thursday, October 13, 2011


Aaron Johnson




Mia Wasikowska and Aaron Johnson


It only takes about fifteen seconds into the trailer to Albert Nobbs,  the "Glenn Close plays a stodgy-lookin' old dude" movie, for Aaron Johnson to doff his top, which was as unexpected a greeting as it was welcome.

(You can think up your own "Aaron Johnson's Nobb" joke here, it's early and I don't have it in me. Ha, I don't have Aaron Johnson's Nobb in me! I did it without even trying! I'm awesome.)

Anyway I am pleased to make your acquaintance, movie! We will be seeing some of each other in the near future. Watch the trailer over at Yahoo. It also stars the always worth watching Mia Wasikowska, who's gotten to rub her stiff britches up on both Aaron and Fassy in one year! Everybody takes notes - this is how you manage your career. Albert Nobbs  is out on January 27th.

Sophia:
I am thinking this movie will make Aaron Johnson bigger then KutcherandMoore
He is 21 years, and his wife is 23 years older. ( AND  :o :o they have mutual kids  :laugh:)

He also played John Lennon in Nowhere. Which his wife directed.

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