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Felicity Huffman Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

Felicity Huffman.jpg

Often lauded for her stage work, Felicity Huffman won a new round of fans as the smart, competent producer Dana Whitaker on the ABC series “Sports Night” (1998-2000). Although born in Westchester County, New York, she was raised in Colorado. Returning east to attend NYU, Huffman joined the Atlantic Theater Company, co-founded by David Mamet and William H Macy. Mamet offered the actress her first screen role, a bit part in “Things Change” (1988), and she was also tapped as Madonna’s understudy and successor in Mamet’s Broadway play “Speed-the-Plow” (also 1988).

Over the course of the next ten years, Huffman alternated between acclaimed stage roles (most often with the Atlantic Theater Company) and TV roles. She made her small screen debut as a series regular portraying the government security officer who aids an elderly man who seems to be growing younger in “Stephen King’s ‘Golden Years’” (CBS, 1991). Guest roles on series like “Law & Order” and “The X-Files” followed. Huffman was tapped to play Edward Asner’s daughter in the ABC sitcom “Thunder Alley” but was replaced after the pilot. She bounced back from that disappointment with a stage success in Mamet’s “The Cryptogram” (1995) and in a supporting turn in the playwright’s film “The Spanish Prisoner” (1998) before landing “Sports Night,” the Aaron Sorkin-penned sit-com that made her a well-known name.

Her real-life husband Macy, whom she married in 1997, joined the series in its second season, sparking an on-screen partnership that would endure through many projects: they also co-starred in the cable telepic “A Case of Murder” (1999), a comedy-mystery Macy adapted from the Donald Westlake novel; they both appeared in director Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” (1999); she had an uncredited turn in Macy’s award-winning TNT telepic “Door To Door,” which he also co-wrote; they reunited in the Showtime mini-series “Out of Order” (2003); and co-starred in the legal potboiler telepic “Reversible Errors” (2004).

After “Sports Night” and away from Macy, Huffman also kept busy solo on the small screen with parts in the telepics “The Heart Department” (2001), “Snap Decision” (2001) and, most impressively, in director John Frankenheimer’s acclaimed HBO drama “The Path to War” (2002), playing First Lady “Lady Bird” Johnson. She also scored a pair of high-profile recurring roles, playing Julia Wilcox, Frasier Crane’s caustic co-worker and eventual love interest on the hit sit-com “Frasier” from 2003-2004, and Charlotte Ellis in the legal drama “The D.A.” After a stint on the big screen as Kate Hudson’s late older sister in the comedy “Raising Helen” (2004), Huffman returned to series drama in the offbeat serial drama “Desperate Housewives” (ABC, 2004 - ), playing Lynette Scavo, a former corporate ladder-climber turned stay-at-home mom who struggles with her insecurities when she can’t control her wild children and gets little support from her husband. The show’s mega-popularity provided Huffman’s career with fresh energy–she scored an Emmy as Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for the series’ debut season, as well as a 2006 Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series–though she continued to remain the most private and low-profile of her co-stars.

Later that same year Huffman had an astonishing turn on the big screen in the indie “Transamerica” (2005) playing a pre-operative transsexual who, on the brink of her transforming surgery, discovered that in her youth she had fathered a son, who contacts her as a troubled teen hustler on the run. Despite the gender-bending premise, the film followed a traditional road movie dynamic, and Huffman won widespread praise for her nearly unrecognizable, fully formed performance. All the attention she received resulted in a Golden Globe award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, which almost guaranteed the actress a nomination from the Academy Awards. And she was indeed one of the nominees for Best Actress in a Leading Role when they were announced the morning of January 31, 2006.

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Glenn Close Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

Glenn_Close.jpg

A strong-featured, coolly patrician blonde, Glenn Close spent her childhood and adolescence involved in the conservative Moral Re-Armament movement. As she entered her teenaged years, she was sent to boarding schools in Switzerland and Connecticut while her physician father operated medical clinics in the Congo (later Zaire). Close spent a couple of years traveling with the folk singing group Up With People before she decided to attend college. After graduating from William and Mary, she headed to NYC where she almost immediately found work with the Phoenix Theatre Company, appearing in “Love for Love” and “The Member of the Wedding”. Close was cast as Mary Tudor in the Richard Rodgers’ musical “Rex” (1976) and she had her breakthrough Broadway role in another musical, “Barnum” (1980), playing the patient wife of showman P T Barnum.

Close was 35 when she made her first film, “The World According to Garp” (1982), cast as Robin Williams’ prim, hard-nosed mother, a role that earned her the first of three consecutive Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominations. She was among the final five for her warmly wise physician wife of Kevin Kline in “The Big Chill” (1983) and again as Robert Redford’s virginal girlfriend in “The Natural” (1984). Close returned to Broadway and won a Tony Award opposite Jeremy Irons in Mike Nichols’ staging of “The Real Thing”, a romantic comedy by Tom Stoppard. Throughout the 1980s, she alternated between high profile features, TV-movies and occasional stage roles. As she ascended to leading lady, she attempted to undertake parts with depth. In the groundbreaking ABC special “Something About Amelia” (1984), Close delineated a woman who gradually comes to realize her husband has been molesting their daughter.

Her Hollywood presence improved with her turn as a lawyer romantically entangled with her client in “Jagged Edge” (1985) and the actress solidified her position and forever altered her screen persona as the vengeful rejected lover in Adrian Lyne’s controversial “Fatal Attraction” (1987). The role earned Close her first Best Actress Oscar nomination and she followed with another nomination for her sexually manipulative aristocrat in “Dangerous Liaisons” (1988). She brought surprising sympathy to the role of the pathetic, frivolous society matron Sunny von Bulow in “Reversal of Fortune” (1990) and proved effective as the rather youthful Gertrude to Mel Gibson’s “Hamlet” (also 1990).

In 1991, Close made her first foray into TV-movie producing with the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” presentation “Sarah, Plain and Tall” (CBS, 1991) which proved so popular two sequels, “Skylark” (CBS, 1993) and “Sarah, Plain and Tall: Winter’s Edge” (CBS, 1999), were produced. Sandwiched between was a return to Broadway opposite Gene Hackman and Richard Dreyfuss in the politically charged “Death and the Maiden” (1992), which earned her a second Tony Award. While she lost the film version of that play to Sigourney Weaver, Close remained busy, but the quality of the films varied. She was fine as the tough managing editor of a tabloid who engages in fisticuffs with a reporter in “The Paper” but was miscast as a repressed spinster Latina in “The House of the Spirits” (both 1994).

Attempting her first leading musical role, silent screen star Norma Desmond in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Sunset Boulevard”, Close achieved diva status reincarnating this larger-than-life tragic character immortalized onscreen by Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder’s 1950 classic. While it was a personal triumph for her, there was some controversy. Patti LuPone who originated the role in London had originally been announced for the Broadway production but her reviews were less favorable than Close’s in Los Angeles. and Close was chosen to open in New York. Some critics did find fault with Close’s singing and over-the-top acting, but audiences were enchanted and she received her third Tony Award.

Following closely on her stage triumph, Close won an Emmy for her shaded portrayal of real-life US Army colonel who disclosed her lesbianism and fought to remain in the military in “Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story” (NBC, 1995). Perhaps as a nod to her Norma Desmond, the actress embodied outsized flamboyant characters and chewed the scenery as a Nancy Reagan-like First Lady in “Mars Attacks!” (1996) and as the live action cartoon Cruella De Vil in Disney’s “101 Dalmatians” (1996), a role she reprised in the 2000 sequel “102 Dalmatians” (her Disney ties were also revived when she voiced Kala, the she-ape who raised the Lord of the Jungle, for the studio’s 1999 animated adaptation of “Tarzan”). Close reined it in to depict a mother whose AIDS-afflicted son has come home to die in HBO’s “In the Gloaming” (1997) with director Christopher Reeve; and as a female prisoner of war in a Japanese camp in “Paradise Road” (1997). As a female US Vice President coping with the kidnapping of the First Family in “Air Force One” (also 1997), the actress once again proved her capability at depicting forceful women, an image Close swiftly tweaked when she played one of her richest roles, the devious Camille Dixon of director Robert Altman’s sunny ensemble comedy “Cookie’s Fortune” (1999), playing the niece of the deceased titular character who discovers Cookie’s dead body and rearranges the death scene to make it look like a break-in and a murder.

Close also scored with her role in “Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her” (2000), an anthology of five loosely connected stories dealing with a variety of very different women in dealing with life problems. In the segment titled “This is Dr. Keener” Close played a successful physician who, at midlife, finds herself alone and perplexed that a new love interest will not return her phone calls. When a remarkably accurate tarot card reader makes a house call, Dr. Keener begins to assess the true emptiness of her own condition.

With challenging roles for actresses of her age often hard to come by on the big screen, Close found challenging work on the small screen, including the 2001 CBS telepic “The Ballad of Lucy Whipple,” playing a recently widowed mother of three who travels to California during the Gold Rush of 1850 to start a new life, clashing with her spirited 13-year-old daughter who does not share her mother’s dream. She also tackled the role of Nelly Forbush in an ABC TV adaptation of the famed Rogers & Hammerstein musical “South Pacific” (2001), had a hilariously high camp guest spot on the NBC sitcom “Will & Grace” which earned her an Emmy nomination as a guest performer, and starred in a CBS Hallmark Hall of Fame production “Brush with Fate” (2003), an adaptation of Susan Vreelands’s collection of stories that trace the history and ownership of what may be an undiscovered work of art by 17th century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer. She also tackled a role made famous by Katharine Hepburn: Eleanor of Aquitaine (opposite Patrick Stewart’s Henry VII) in a television version of “The Lion in Winter” (2003-2004).

In 2005, Close earned her first Golden Globe Award, for Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television, for her performance in “The Lion in Winter,” along with a Screen Actors Guild Award as Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries, and she received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie. Close followed up as part of the ensemble of the 2004 telepic “Strip Search,” which explored themes surrounding the loss of personal freedom in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2002 terrorist attacks.

Back on the big screen, she essayed a series of supporting roles, playing a dutiful mother obsessively tending to her comatose son in “The Safety of Objects” (2001) and a warm, experienced and practical American academic living in Paris who quietly and knowingly observes her naive young assistant (Kate Hudson) enter into an affair with an older, married Frenchman in the Merchant Ivory production of “Le Divorce” (2003). Segueing into a full-blown comedic role, Close grandly hit all the right notes as too-perfect Claire Wellington, the grand dame of the Stepford society of subservient spouses in the otherwise failed satirical remake of the thriller “The Stepford Wives” (2004). The actress then took on her first regular role in a television series, joining the cast of FX’s gritty crime drama “The Shield” in its fourth season in 2005, playing the shrewd new precinct commander Capt. Monica Rawling, offering redemption to the series’ antihero Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis). Producers credited a 30% vise in viewers to her presence, but the actress chose to depart the series at the conclusion of her first season.

Stepping back into the more comfortable realm of character-drive drama, she appeared in the weighty “Heights” (2005), playing the mother of a New York City photographer (Elizabeth Banks) who begins to rethink her open marriage, while her daughter has second thoughts about her pending nuptials with her lawyer fiancée (James Marsden). Questions soon force answers, as all involved make life decisions in the course of a single night. “Heights” received good reviews from most critics, with the typical kudos Close has been given throughout her career. She then appeared in a strong ensemble cast in “Nine Lives” (2005), playing a widowed mother whose life has been taken over by her precocious young daughter (Dakota Fanning).

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