It was a look of genuine shock. With her mouth agape, stunned for a few seconds before rising from her seat, tears falling at the first standing ovation, and then a second—Glenn Close didn’t expect to win the lead-drama-actress Golden Globe in January, besting then front-runner Lady Gaga. Long considered one of the great actresses of our time, and with a career’s worth of nominations to prove it, Close had somehow never claimed a major film award during her 45-year career. Her stockpile of trophies—Golden Globes, Emmys, and Tonys, three of each—have been awarded for TV or stage performances, with the exception of this year’s Golden Globe for The Wife. Now, with her seventh Oscar nomination, for playing the stoic Joan Castleman in the Sony Pictures Classics film, Close is the most-nominated actress without a win in Academy Awards history.

Given her record, Close says that she tempers herself going into award ceremonies: “I keep myself to zero expectations just for my own mental health.” That she, at age 71, is being celebrated by the film community for a role so personal, during the #MeToo- and Time’s Up-induced cultural shift that Hollywood has undergone in the last two years, makes the recognition even sweeter. An Oscar, says Close, “would go far beyond just me and the award.”

Not wanting to jinx things, she digresses. “I don’t know if this [attitude] is for my emotional survival, or it just might be who I am,” she says, “but when I’ve done a job and played a character that I’ve felt was to the very best of my ability, and I got deep into the character and lost in that character, that is the most important thing. When that character has resonance and connection with people … that, for me, is the award.”

In anticipation of Close’s historic seventh attempt at an Oscar, here is a look back on her lead- and supporting-actress-nominated film roles.

Though the College of William & Mary graduate began her stage career in her late 20s, Close was 35 when she appeared in her first film—playing Jenny Fields, the eccentric, feminist nurse in director George Roy Hill’s adaptation of John Irving’s best-selling novel. Hill called her in to audition after seeing her play Charity Barnum in the original Broadway production of Barnum, in the early 1980s—the role that earned her her first Tony nomination.

She had been told the filmmakers wanted “a young Katharine Hepburn,” which appealed to Close because seeing Hepburn on The Dick Cavett Show cemented her decision to pursue an acting career. (Years later, Hepburn would hear this and write Close a letter saying she was glad she persuaded the actress “to join this terrible profession, this terrifying profession, and, let’s face it, this delicious way to spend your life.”)

“[Jenny] was a New Englander and, for the audition, I wore no makeup and kind of talked like Katharine Hepburn,” recalls Close. “I heard later that [the director] thought it was one of the worst auditions he’s ever seen. I guess there was enough there, though, that he soldiered on, and I was invited to table-read with my best friend, Mary Beth Hurt, who ended up playing Garp’s wife.” (Garp was played by Robin Williams.)

“It was my first movie, and I had no idea what I was doing,” says Close, who learned a valuable lesson on set when she overheard Hill say that he had been surprised by what he saw in the dailies—details he hadn’t noticed while directing a scene. “It made me realize that the director has so many other things to look at, maybe he doesn’t see the nuances of what you’re doing. I remember that vividly.”

After Lawrence Kasdan saw Close in The World According to Garp, he reached out to her for his ensemble comedy, about college friends re-uniting a decade after graduation to mourn the death of a friend.

“As eccentric as Jenny Fields was, she was basically a nurturer,” recalls Close. “So I remember when Larry Kasdan had a table read in New York, and we all arrived; I told him, ‘I bet I know who you want me to play: Sarah,’ ” says Close—referencing the caregiver and glue of the group, a physician married to Kevin Kline’s character. She had guessed right.

Still new to moviemaking, Close says, she learned another important lesson while filming a scene in which her character confesses to having had an affair. “I had the first flash of understanding how powerful thought is on film—real thought that is in character and resonates in a close-up,” Close says. “It’s O.K. to take your time, to literally think in character. Onstage, words are everything, and you have such a sense of timing. But with film, you have close-ups and mid-shots…. That moment on the second-floor porch of the Beaufort, South Carolina, home [in The Big Chill] led me to the performance that I gave in The Wife, which is basically all close-up and thought.”

Close ended up forfeiting what would have been her first leading film role—opposite Christopher Reeve in James Ivory’s adaptation of The Bostonians—to play Robert Redford’s childhood sweetheart, Iris Gaines, in The Natural. Even though her character was restricted to a few short scenes, Close seared in the part—receiving the only acting Oscar nomination for the Barry Levinson-directed mythic baseball drama, and her third consecutive nod in three years.

“I had already been cast in The Bostonians when Bob asked me to come and see him,” says Close, explaining that Redford thought she might be able to film both projects. “It was during the negotiations of trying to make it work for me to do both that [The Bostonians producer] Ismail Merchant said, ‘She’s fired.’ So I did The Natural and loved it.”

“Iris is a woman who has internal strength,” says Close, referencing a scene in which Redford’s Roy Hobbs comes to her character’s apartment and sees a baseball glove on the sofa that belongs to her son, whom Hobbs does not know he fathered. “Instead of flinging herself back in the arms of this gorgeous man she’s loved her whole life, she doesn’t. I loved that about her because she wasn’t going to link up with a man she has to get to know again. She didn’t know whether she wanted him coming back into their lives as the father. It meant that I had to throw Robert Redford out of my apartment, which was really painful,” Close says with a laugh. “Well, it was painful because it was painful for her.”

Producers considered Debra Winger, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Jessica Lange to play the role of Alex Forrest—the mistress of Michael Douglas’s character, Dan Gallagher—in Adrian Lyne’s psychological thriller. They then agreed to audition Close, who had been pigeonholed playing nurturing characters at that point in her career. To audition for the sexy, emotionally vulnerable character, Close changed her look. “My hair was long, and I didn’t know what to do with it,” she has said. “I finally said, ‘Fuck this,’ and I let it go all crazy.”

Once she was cast as Alex, Close gave the Fatal Attraction script to psychiatrists in hopes of understanding her character’s motivations. They deduced that Alex might have been a victim of incest as a child. “I had to understand her behavior, even though the audience doesn’t,” says Close. “And in that process I really began to love her and have great sympathy for her. So it was shocking for me that, once the movie premiered, she got such a negative response from the audience. Her behavior, it was just labeled evil…. I was playing a very specific, tortured person.”

Famously, after test audiences rejected an ending in which Alex commits suicide, Paramount Pictures asked for re-shoots where the character is murdered instead. Close disagreed with the new ending, and initially refused to shoot it. “I called William Hurt, and he said, ‘You’ve made your point. Now it’s your responsibility to buck up and just do it,’ ” Close recalled to Vanity Fair in 2017.

Begrudgingly convinced, Close went back for re-shoots. While filming the violent bathroom wrestling scene at the end of the film, she got a concussion and was taken to the hospital—where she learned she was pregnant with her daughter, Annie Starke. “I was newly pregnant during all that violent bathtub stuff, and being bashed into the mirror,” says Close.

After Fatal Attraction was released, there was controversy about whether Close’s character was pregnant at the time of her death. Fast-forward to the Academy Awards, where Close was nominated in the lead-actress category for the first time.

“I was eight months pregnant,” she remembers. “Michael [Douglas] and I were presenting one of the Oscars at the beginning of the show. There had been all that controversy as to whether Alex was pregnant, and I come out onstage hugely pregnant. The audience just started laughing, and I remember it took us a couple of seconds to realize how wonderful this image was of Alex Forrest, walking out with Dan and being hugely pregnant. It was her triumph.”

Close initially had been cast to play the conniving Marquise de Merteuil opposite Kevin Spacey in the Broadway production of Dangerous Liaisons. When that opportunity fell through, she thought she’d never have a chance at the role again. Then director Stephen Frears decided to adapt Christopher Hampton’s stage play—based on the 1782 novel from Pierre Choderlos de Laclos—and cast Close as the marquise.

“I’d gotten a second chance. It was so exciting,” says Close, who joined the production halfway through filming—less than two months after delivering her daughter. “[The marquise] is one of the great characters, like Elizabeth I,” Close has said, “a woman of great mental ability, brilliant, kind of caught between being a woman in her particular era, but she refuses to be treated like one. And she meets her match, her great love and great hate of her life, really, in the character played by [John] Malkovich.”

The film marked another first: “It was the only time I had been sent home because I couldn’t remember my lines,” Close has said. “In that scene where the marquise is talking about how she created herself, I was so tired from having a newborn that I couldn’t remember my line. And I remember Stephen said, ‘Just stop. Just go home and sleep.’ My eyes were so red.”

Close first played Albert Nobbs—the cross-dressing character dreamed up by George Moore in his 1918 novella—in a 1982 stage production. “I never forgot the story, and I never forgot the character,” says the actress, who spent 15 years trying to get a film adaptation made. “I always thought that it would make, in the right hands, a wonderful movie.”

When Close finally put the script—which she had co-written—into the hands of producer Bonnie Curtis, she told Curtis, “‘I need to play this character before I die.’ … I just wasn’t willing to come to the end of my life and say, ‘I gave up the fight,’ and so we kept fighting for it to happen.”

Eventually, Close found director Rodrigo Garcia and secured a budget so that, nearly 30 years after first playing Nobbs, she could again channel the character. “By that time my face had gotten famous, and I thought my face can’t be a liability to this character because she’s a woman who was hiding in plain sight,” says Close. “I got my wonderful friend Matthew Mungle, who is a great special-effects guy, and spent a whole day with him. . . . I was sitting at Matthew’s makeup table, and he subtly changed my nose and the size of my ears. Then we put in a plumper to the bottom of my teeth. At one point I looked up and it wasn’t my face anymore. And I just started weeping and said, ‘This is Albert.’ ”

Like Albert Nobbs, Joan Castleman is a character who resonated so deeply with Close that she spent years trying to bring her to life on-screen. Working with screenwriter Jane Anderson, who optioned the 2003 Meg Wolitzer novel on which The Wife is based, Close saw flashes of her own mother in Joan—a stoic woman who forfeited her ambitions to take care of her family. Because of the quiet nature of the character, Close telegraphs Joan’s emotional trajectory via close-ups—the kind she realized the potential of while filming The Big Chill. The project was an opportunity for Close to work with her daughter, Annie, who plays a younger Joan in flashbacks. Together, they drew on their female relatives as inspiration.

“We were thinking of my mother and her grandmothers,” explains Close. “Her paternal grandmother was a chemist in the 40s. When she got pregnant, they basically fired her and she never went back. . . . She was an incredible mother, but . . . you felt that she, like my mom, had dreams and talent that she had never been able to express.”

“[My mother] never would contemplate life without [my father],” Close says. “She had a great sense of sticking to her vows, and I think that’s the generation she grew up in. In an ideal world, how wonderful for all of us to stick to our vows. I’m not particularly proud of the fact that I’ve been married three times, but that’s just the way life is. And I think you have to keep your creative soul alive, whatever that takes.”

Oscar Bridesmaids

Peter O’Toole
O’Toole received an honorary Oscar, having never won competitively the eight times he was nominated.

Richard Burton
Elizabeth Taylor’s main squeeze got seven nominations but not a single win.

Amy Adams
Six nominations, no wins (yet): has Adams become the new Glenn Close?

Deborah Kerr
Kerr, also an honorary-Oscar recipient, never won best actress after six nods in 11 years.

Thelma Ritter
The consummate supporting actress was up for the prize six times; she never won.