GLENN Close is not famous or classical good looks. For stewing a rabbit in one - of her films, yes; for beauty, no. Yet in the flesh, almost on her home turf in New York city, she is surprisingly attractive. Petite; and fine boned, with fashionably close cropped hair, she does not look like a woman turning 50 next year.
She is here to publicise her much lauded performance as Cruella De Vil in the live action remake of Disney's 101 Dalmatians' - a film that sees her sporting alarmingly spiky heels and a waist redolent of waif model Kate Moss. She says: "I knew I had to be on a strict regime even before I had the costume fitting. I was in pretty good shape then but I could only wear the corsets for 20 minutes at a time, so I knew the thinner I was, the longer I'd be able to wear them. In any case, I was in deep pain most of the time."
Worse was to come - a week of filming in a vat of revolting looking goop, in a coat that must have weighed 90 pounds and a wig that had to be refrigerated every night. "It was just one of those very unpleasant things and I didn't know how unpleasant until I was actually doing it." She looks pained just remembering it.
Portraying a cartoon legend - and an inherently evil one - certainly presented problems. "We started with outrageous faces and cats' eyes, but it just didn't work. I looked like the Joker in Batman. We really went the gamut because how do you translate or humanise this wonderful character? I wanted her to be very, very bad and very, very frightening because I think of this as a fairytale and in every fairytale you need a very defined sense of evil for good to win out in the end."
The Cruella who ultimately emerged evidently did the trick. The sheep on set were terrified, as was, one of the dalmatians playing Perdy. "In the scene where l come and see the puppies for the first time, saying `How marvellous!' little Perdy would slink off the set with her tail between her legs. I felt very bad."
Only Close's Marquess De Merteuil in Stephen Frears's Dangerous Liaisons has been as devilish. "She is certainly the character I've done who comes closest to being as evil. I think Cruella and the Marquess would have been very good friends. Maybe it's the corsets that make you evil."
Indeed, since Fatal Attraction paralysed the world's men with fear, Close has played a string of less than savoury characters. It wasn't always this way. "I knew I wanted to be an actress from about the age of seven. I just enjoyed pretending. We lived in the countryside and hardly ever watched television, so we just used, our imagination and I loved that. The real truth is that at that age, I wanted to knock on Walt Disney's door and ask him if I could be in his movies. That was my dream. So finally to be in a Disney film at this stage of my life is lovely."
She moves effortlessly from age seven to the present, probably unintentionally since Close has called the period of her life from seven to 22 The Dark Years. Her surgeon father and mother removed Close and her three siblings from what sounds an idyllic childhood to the care of Moral Rearmament, a group as archly conservative as its name suggests. The family was swiftly dispatched to Zaire and Close was enrolled in a Swiss boarding school. It is a period of her life she will not discuss.
Later, she studied anthropology and acting before moving to New York where she joined a theatre company and met a woman called Meryl Streep. Streep had already won her first Oscar (in 1980, ford Kramer Vs Kramer) before Close had even made a film. Her first was 1982's The World According To Garp, which garnered her an Oscar nomination. Even then, Close's less conventional looks pigeonholed her as a character actress rather than a leading lady.
Movies are fantasy, she says, and women are part of that fantasy: "So you want to see beautiful women. Jenny Fields (her character in Garp) was 15 years older than I was, so all I got after that were these nurturing women. Nonetheless, her subsequent roles in The Big Chill (as a woman offering her husband to a friend desperate to become pregnant) and The Natural opposite Robert Redford also brought her Oscar nominations.
Fatal Attraction, however, changed everything. The knife she wielded in the film has pride of place in her home and she remains eternally grateful to Alex Forrest. "People always said: `She can act, but can she be sexy?' I thought, oh come on, Jenny Fields wasn't someone who bares her breasts. You basically play the characters you're asked to play and I had always felt very uncomfortable meeting directors as me. I don't think I'm the kind of actress people can immediately imagine in a role."
Even after Fatal Attraction, she continued to play the roles of women substantially older than herself, most notably Mel Gibson's mother in Zeffirelli's 1990 Hamlet. Gibson is only nine years younger than Close.
In The First Wives Club, Goldie Hawn says there are only three roles for women in Hollywood: the babe, the District Attorney and Driving Miss Daisy. Is that true? Close laughs. "Well, I've been a District, Attorney (in 1985's chilling Jagged Edge) and someone offered me a part the other day in which I would play a 65 year old woman. I said: `Why? Let me wait for that!' So in many ways it's true."
Older women, she adds, are seen "as more to contend with. "A lot of people really don't know what to do with women when they get more complicated and interesting."
Does she think the success of The First Wives Club will revolutionise Hollywood's thinking about women too old to be babes, too young to be Miss Daisy? "Hopefully it will be an evolution and I think we're better off now than we were 10 years ago. There is also a very strong generation of actresses my age, so hopefully we'll be used."
For now, though, Close is happy" to spend time at home - a former farmhouse in upstate New York, which she shares with her eight year old daughter Annie and Steve Beers, a carpenter who worked on the set of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard, in which Close starred in Los Angeles and Broadway in the role of Norma Desmond.
The tabloids were at first fascinated by the romantic pairing, perhaps because he is 10 years younger than her, but since they are still together, the tabloid coverage has waned. "I just don't think I'm interesting enough for them," Close speculates. "I don't go to a lot of events, I don't live in Hollywood and I don't spend a lot of time buying clothes. I'm actually a very bad shopper."
She despises the cult of celebrity - "I think it's way out of proportion to what we deserve" - and its impact on family life. "I left Sunset Boulevard when I did because for a year and a hall, Annie had been put to bed by someone other than me. It's getting harder and harder to leave home and I've spent a lot of time away this year, so I feel it's time to pull back a bit. I'm getting offered very interesting things and the terrible dilemma is balancing life with work and keeping yourself recharged, so you can do justice to the work."
She will pop up again in cinemas soon, playing the US First Lady in Tim Burton's typically unorthodox answer to Independence Day, Mars Attacks! She recently completed a TV movie called In The Gloaming, about a mother whose son returns home to die of AIDS. It was directed by Christopher Reeve, an experience Close describes as "very humbling".
She will next appear in Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road as a "very English" woman interned by the Japanese during the second World War, and she is currently making yet another film, Air Force One, with Harrison Ford.
"I play the United States Vice President. I wonder if anyone will be able to believe that after Cruella."