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