American actress who drew acclaim for her considerable range and versatility.

Close grew up in Greenwich, a town her ancestors had helped to found. Her father was a well-known surgeon who left the mansions and well-manicured lawns of Greenwich to open a medical clinic in the Belgian Congo (now Congo 【Kinshasa】) when Close was 13. She spent several years in Africa and at boarding schools in Switzerland before returning to Connecticut to live with her grandmother and attend Rosemary Hall, an exclusive girls' school in Greenwich. Following her high-school graduation in 1965, Close spent several years touring Europe and the United States with a musical group called Up with People.

In 1970 Close enrolled at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va. After graduating in 1974 with a degree in drama and a Phi Beta Kappa key, she joined the New Phoenix Repertory Company and made her Broadway debut that same year. A succession of other theatre roles followed, and Close's reputation grew. In 1980 she received a Tony Award nomination for her role in Barnum, which drew the attention of motion-picture director George Roy Hill, who offered her a role in The World According to Garp (1982), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress.

Following her film debut in Garp, Close was nominated for Oscars as best supporting actress for roles in The Big Chill (1983) and The Natural (1984). In 1987 and 1989 she received best actress Academy Award nominations for her roles as a psychopathic temptress in the thriller Fatal Attraction and as the scheming Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons.

In the 1990s Close starred in such films as Hamlet (1990); Reversal of Fortune (1990); The House of the Spirits (1993), based on the novel by Isabel Allende (Allende, Isabel); and in the journalism comedy The Paper (1994). In 1996 she took such varied roles as the first lady in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! and as Cruella De Vil in a live-action remake of the Disney film 101 Dalmatians. The following year Close starred as the vice president, alongside Harrison Ford (Ford, Harrison), in the thriller Air Force One (1997). Close's later film roles included the ringleader of a group of ideal suburban wives in The Stepford Wives (2004) and the mother of a nervous bride in Evening (2007).

Although best known for her work onscreen, Close had a distinguished career as a stage actress. She received Tony Awards in 1984 and 1992 for her work in The Real Thing and Death and the Maiden. In 1995 she impressed Broadway audiences as the delusional former film star Norma Desmond in Andrew Lloyd Webber (Lloyd Webber, Andrew, Baron Lloyd-Webber of Sydmonton)'s theatrical production of Sunset Boulevard, for which she won another Tony Award for best actress in a musical.

One of the few performers to be nominated for the top awards in film, theatre, and television, Close also earned Emmy Awards (Emmy Award) for her roles in the television movie Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story (1995) and in the dramatic series Damages (2008). In 2005 she won a Golden Globe Award for her performance as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter (2003), a television remake of the 1968 film.