Dangerous Liaisons.

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 23-JUL-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Glenn Close is an actress whom people respect but don't give their love to, the way they do to, say, the living national treasure Meryl Streep, who is roughly Close's age peer and one of the few other American actresses who have some degree of majesty. (Anjelica Huston is another, but the list is short. All three, interestingly or not, have notably irregular, majestic noses. You aspiring actresses, cancel that consultation with the plastic surgeon.) Over the years, Close has become a finite entity in our minds. We don't think of her and imagine the possible roles she could play; we think "Fatal Attraction" and "Dangerous Liaisons" and Cruella De Vil, from "101 Dalmatians." Hollywood casting directors apparently share our limited imaginations (Close was in her mid-thirties by the time she made her feature-film debut, thereby missing out on romantic leads, which for women are mostly, and perversely, reserved for the junior-varsity squad), but she has used our idea of her to very good effect in her most recent television outings. She was sensational, two years ago, as a season-long guest star on "The Shield," playing the new police captain in a hornet's nest of a precinct in Los Angeles. In her first episode, her character immediately established herself as strong, smooth, tough, cool, observant, amusable,...

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