LOW CLOUDS DARKEN the April sun as Glenn Close turns onto a country road toward the place where she intends, she says, smiling, to die. The actress, 78, started her day much like any other. Shortly after dawn, she put on a pair of brown Carhartt work pants and a white button-up shirt and fed Sir Pippin of Beanfield, or Pip, her 9-year-old Havanese. Together they drove from her two-bedroom home in a modest section of Bozeman, Mont., a ski town in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, to Main Street Overeasy for pancakes, which she soaked with her own batch of Canadian maple syrup, kept by the diner’s owner in the kitchen. On the side of the jug, she’s listed in black Sharpie those who may use it: Alexander “Sandy” Close, her younger brother; Tina Close, her older sister; Jessie Close, her younger sister; Annie Starke, her only daughter; and Marc Albu, Annie’s husband; as well as some nieces, nephews and other in-laws. After breakfast, Close visited Sandy, 74, a machinist, at his workshop to see about polishing a few salvaged copper doorknobs, then headed to a home supply store in search of a hydraulic log splitter.

Now, just before noon, we arrive not too far north of Bozeman at what will be the home she’s always wanted. From a distance, a half-dozen or so connected stone and wooden structures, organized around a main building with an open dining and living area that’ll have an imposing fireplace and a loft for watching movies in, resemble a country club more than a private residence. She points to a tiny guesthouse, a near replica of her maternal grandparents’ cottage in Greenwich, Conn., where she lived on and off as a child. “When I get really feeble, that’s where I’m going to be,” she says. “It’ll be tighter than a tick.”

Strong winds push through the construction site, rattling the fir siding and sending a shiver down the stream that cuts across the sprawling property. Close can’t wait for what it’ll feel like when it’s all done: lazy evenings in the library; the sound of her grandson, Rory, playing outside. “And a big, wonderful room for all of us to get together,” she says. “We’ve never had that.” The compound — Mooreland, as she calls it, after her mother’s side of the family — is in part a testament to her siblings. Jessie, who’s bipolar, landed in Bozeman in 1984 during a string of manic episodes; a friend told her it was an easy place to find work. In 2019, long after Sandy had joined their sister, followed by Tina, Close arrived permanently from New York. “Every nail is from a character I’ve created,” she says as we look around. “I go away and do my movies to pay for this house.”

She leads us out back to a memorial to her uncle John Campbell Moore, who was killed in a naval attack during World War II. “I think they were all in the bow when the rocket hit,” she says. “My mom’s only consolation was that he hopefully died immediately.” Although that was four years before Close was born, her voice catches as she reads his epitaph, a poem he wrote at age 9. “ ‘Little seed, little seed,’” she begins, “ ‘have you got a plan to turn to a flower and above the ground stand?’” Starke, 37, an actress and TV chef whose father is the film producer John H. Starke — whom Close dated for a few years beginning in the late 1980s, shortly after her second divorce — has stopped by with 3-month-old Rory. “You’re really getting the full dose, aren’t you?” she says to me, stifling a laugh. But Close stays in her moment. “ ‘Little flower, little flower, when you were a seed, why did you turn flower instead of a weed?’”

AT NEARLY 10,000 feet, Sacagawea Peak, the highest mountain in this part of southwestern Montana, rises just beyond Mooreland. Close, who suggested we hike some of it, navigates her all-terrain vehicle around a series of sharp cliffside turns. When the snow becomes too deep, we continue on foot, pausing only to catch our breath or identify animal remains along the trail. At a creek, she lies on her stomach, suspended over a mossy bank, and drinks. “You gotta try this,” she says. Sensing my hesitation, she takes another sip. “You could get giardia.” Then a gulp, followed by a grin. “But it is an easy way to lose a couple of pounds.”

Most performers, when they reach a certain level of fame, tend to recede from the world, making room, whether by design or consequence, for the idea of a person — the star. These days, fewer of those stars talk unguardedly with journalists. Podcasts, especially ones hosted by other stars, are cozier; social media has the advantage of being instant and unmediated. But Close is a holdout from a different generation. For her, openness is its own strategy: Even at her most vulnerable or unassuming, she’s never not aware of her audience. When placing a drink order, she articulates each word (“Twelve. Ounce. Matcha. Latte”) as if playing to the balcony. When she throws her head back and laughs, you can almost hear the cameras flashing. She’s also a very thoughtful listener, quick to pick up on the cues of those around her. Kim Kardashian, 44, her castmate on “All’s Fair,” Ryan Murphy’s new Hulu series about a firm of female divorce lawyers, refers to her as a “mentor” and a “girl’s girl.” John Lithgow, 79, who’s worked with Close on three projects, including 1982’s “The World According to Garp” and a 2014 stage production of Edward Albee’s “A Delicate Balance,” says that she always makes sure there’s a place for actors to congregate. (During “A Delicate Balance,” she encouraged the cast, many of whom had worked together before, “to bring in photographs from our joint history,” he recalls. “That’s very, very Glenn.”) The investor Warren Buffett, 95, a friend who accompanied her on ukulele as they sang the 1986 power ballad “Glory of Love” at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in 2013, says, “She usually manages to place me in situations where my face turns red.” At Close’s urging, the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, 77, a self-described “cat man all my life,” bought three Havanese after “the ghastly ‘Cats’ movie happened [in 2019],” he says. “Glenn is unlike any major film star I know, in the sense that she’s normal, wants a laugh and doesn’t want to do anything unless it’s fun.”

Part of Close’s appeal is that she remains, however improbably, an outsider. After three Emmys, three Tonys and three Golden Globes, she’s still the underdog: a dramatic actress with a musical theater background; a femme fatale who can be quite shy off camera; a routinely snubbed leading lady (eight Oscar nominations, the most an actress has ever earned without a win). In her most celebrated roles, even the quieter ones, from the scheming marquise in “Dangerous Liaisons” (1988) to the disregarded Joan Castleman, the secret author of her husband’s Nobel Prize-winning work, in “The Wife” (2017), there’s an immensity to Close’s performances, an outsize theatricality that she shares with Patti LuPone, Bernadette Peters and other grandes dames of the stage. And if some of her performances can verge on camp — her Cruella de Vil in “101 Dalmatians” (1996) and its sequel was a kind of drag; so was showing up at a premiere in character — it’s that very intensity that, oddly, makes those characters more relatable. In this era of effortlessness, when some worry about appearing as though they’re trying too hard or caring too much, Close always lets us see the mechanics at work; she can’t help it. “I’ve come to believe that stage work is basically molecular,” she tells me. “You have to set up an energy field, and you do that literally with muscle and sinew. In film, you have to know where to put that energy. For a while, I thought I was gonna blow out the camera.”

For all her bigness, no one falls apart onscreen like Close, in spectacular fashion, but also softly. In such intimate films as Christopher Reeve’s “In the Gloaming” (1997), about a 30-something AIDS patient who comes home to die, or Rodrigo Garcia’s “Four Good Days” (2021), about a heroin addict, or Charlie McDowell’s “The Summer Book” (2025), about a grieving 9-year-old girl on a remote Finnish island, she’s played the mothers and grandmothers of ailing children, bringing remarkable control to those who are struggling to retain it. The director Rian Johnson, 51, cast her as Martha Delacroix, the imperious (and, he adds, “slightly terrifying”) keeper of a small-town church in upstate New York, in “Wake Up Dead Man,” his “Knives Out” mystery series’s third installment, which will be released this December, because, he says, she grounds every character, no matter how wild or wayward. “It’s a part that could very easily, in other hands, tip over into caricature,” he says. “I knew that she would get the deliciousness [of Martha] but also make her human.”

Close says she became an actress “to explain us to ourselves.” When she was cast in the 1987 thriller “Fatal Attraction” as Alex Forrest, a book editor who becomes obsessed with a married lawyer (Michael Douglas) after a weekend affair, going so far as to boil his daughter’s pet rabbit, she consulted experts in borderline personality disorder to see if a person might really do such a thing. (Yes, she was told, they might.) Alex would become “The Most Hated Woman in America,” as one tabloid put it, but Close always thought of the character differently, imagining her as an incest survivor. “She’d been treated like a sex object before she even knew what sex was,” she says. “And she hates herself.” In a 1982 staging of the George Moore novella “Albert Nobbs,” and in its 2011 film adaptation, which she co-wrote, Close played a 19th-century Irish butler who presents as a man. Audiences, she says, were quick to label the character a lesbian or transgender woman. For her, though, it was more interesting to think of Albert as “an unfinished person.”

The range of her roles, especially the later ones, many of which have required an active rejection of vanity, speaks not only to her bravery and curiosity but to the reality of being a woman in Hollywood, particularly one who doesn’t refuse to grow old. In the wake of the #MeToo movement and other course corrections in the entertainment business, there have never been so many opportunities for actresses of a certain age and pedigree; Helen Mirren, 80, and June Squibb, 95, can now be action heroes. Yet it’s hard to imagine any of Close’s male peers (a John Malkovich or a Jeff Bridges) headlining a Ryan Murphy soap opera with a Kardashian sister. For Close and other female stars, a diverse portfolio of work isn’t just a choice or challenge; it’s insurance. And despite her initial hesitation about flaunting what she calls her “saggy arms” and “muffin top” as Alberta, the religious white mother to a biracial, alcoholic daughter in last year’s supernatural melodrama “The Deliverance” — a part meant for Oprah, who declined, the director Lee Daniels, 65, says, because she believes “evil spirits do jump on you” — Close ultimately found the experience liberating. “She lives life large, and I love that. It’s the opposite of me but it’s just so wonderful,” she says. “There’s nothing more boring than a WASP.” Daniels was nervous about casting Close as the sexualized widow. But, he says, she “jumped off the cliff with me.” Even if certain pockets of the internet took issue with Close’s portrayal, especially one profane bit of dialogue in an exorcism scene that she delivers as a demonic taunt after sniffing the air, Daniels says, “I told her, ‘You’re giving swag to this white woman. You’re going to be beloved.’” Close, who said she wouldn’t promote the film if Netflix cut the offending line, wanted to play Alberta primarily because she didn’t understand her, at least at first. “I didn’t read a lot of reviews, but some said, ‘She’s over the top, blah, blah.’ I was like, ‘[Expletive] you,’” she recalls. “Lee called me up and said, ‘Every single Black person knows a white woman like this; white people won’t get her.’ And that’s exactly what happened.”

Close has appeared in some 70 films, but no character has meant more to her — or revealed more about her — than Norma Desmond, the aging silent-film actress desperate for a comeback in “Sunset Boulevard.” The role was inaugurated in the 1950 Billy Wilder movie by Gloria Swanson, who, according to the critic Molly Haskell, embodied it with “all the grace and dignity of a weasel in heat.” In Jamie Lloyd’s stripped-down Broadway production, Nicole Scherzinger, who won this year’s Tony for her performance, interpreted Norma as an entitled recluse — a Real Housewife of the Studio System. Close, who led the original 1994 Broadway cast of “Sunset Boulevard,” for which she won a Tony, and who reprised the role in a 2017 revival, brought psychological complexity to the part. Where others had leaned into the grandeur of a delusional prima donna, she was drawn to something sadder, more human: “A great artist,” Close says, who clings with devastating conviction to the belief that she can still make the world fall in love with her. “She didn’t lose her career because she had a weird voice. She lost her career because the industry moved on, and she’s too old. Can you imagine having all that just taken away?” For decades, Close has been trying to remake “Sunset Boulevard” as a film, navigating ageism, creative overhauls and Hollywood’s reluctance to bet on a big-budget movie musical. And yet, you believe her when she tells you it’s moving forward, because you want to — because you know that Norma is the great role of her lifetime, and that it might be her best shot at winning an Oscar. And because, from the very beginning, Close has had to fight for things not to be taken away.

BACK IN BOZEMAN, Close sits on her porch watching a storm roll in. In the coming months, between text messages about moose sightings (“beautifully primitive”), packing indecision (“terrible affliction”) and a three-episode arc with Pip on Drew Barrymore’s reboot of “Hollywood Squares” (“the ‘I’m always up for anything’ side of things”), the actress, a keen observer of clouds, will send numerous pictures and narrated videos of nimbus formations, each more awe-struck than the last. An American flag rustles in the wind. “I put it out every day,” she says. “Even though you can easily feel like it’s been commandeered, I love this country.”

The conversation turns to “Hillbilly Elegy,” the 2020 Ron Howard film based on JD Vance’s 2016 memoir about growing up poor and disenfranchised in Middletown, Ohio, in which she portrays Mamaw, Vance’s grandmother Bonnie Blanton Vance, who reportedly had 19 loaded guns in her home when she died in 2005 at age 72. Close didn’t spend time with Vance, who wasn’t yet a politician; he and his wife, Usha, a former trial lawyer, were, she says, “very, very supportive” and visited the set, but he mostly consulted with the actors playing versions of his younger self. “I mean, it’s just so ironic,” she says. “He had a huge chip on his shoulder because of a lot of the people he met at Yale. And then he married a woman [whose parents are] not from America” — they’d emigrated from India in the 1980s — “probably because she was easier to relate to.” Close, who condemns what she calls the “crass cruelty” of the Trump administration, acknowledges that the vice president had a difficult early life. “I had a [expletive]-up, albeit benign, childhood, and I’m still dealing with that,” she says. “I’m not excusing him, but Mamaw did set her husband on fire.”

“Glennie!” Just then, Jessie, 72, a writer and photographer, and her two dogs, Goodness and Gracious, emerge from her house across the street. (Tina, 80, an artist, lives on the edge of town with a flock of parrots.) She’s come to discuss tomorrow’s fund-raiser for the area’s first adult inpatient psychiatric unit. In 2010, she and Close founded Bring Change to Mind, a nonprofit devoted to erasing the stigma around mental health issues; by next year, they hope to support over 800 student-led high school programs across the country. (Robin Walker, their first volunteer, says, “Glenn’s not just the face of this — she’s in it.”) On a dresser inside the house, there’s a copy of “Resilience,” Jessie’s 2015 memoir, co-written with the journalist Pete Earley and featuring essays by Close. In the book, Jessie chronicles her struggles with addiction and mental illness, culminating one afternoon in the spring of 2004, when, during a family gathering at their parents’ home in Big Piney, Wyo., Jessie, then in her 50s, told Close that she was suicidal. After decades of distance between the siblings, a legacy of their upbringing but also a response to Close’s growing celebrity — “I make more money and I’m considered successful and, you know, they’ve had different lives,” she says — Jessie’s confession was an unlikely balm. “ ‘I can’t stop thinking about killing myself,’ I blurted out,” she writes. “Glenn stepped forward and wrapped her arms around me. She guided me to a bench on the guesthouse veranda and called Tina.”

Close’s parents, William Close, a doctor and military pilot, and Bettine Moore Close, a homemaker, came from well-off families with troubled histories. In 1914, Close’s paternal great-grandfather, the breakfast cereal magnate C.W. Post, shot himself at age 59. A year later, one of Bettine’s uncles, claiming to be a German spy, took four men hostage at gunpoint and threatened to brand one of them with a hot poker. In the 1950s, Bill and Bettine joined Moral Re-Armament, a religious group — “a cult,” Close clarifies — started in 1938 by the American evangelist Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman, who proselytized about world peace and adherence to the Four Absolutes: honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. When Close was 13, her parents relocated the family to a converted mountaintop hotel in the Swiss village of Caux, where M.R.A. had established its headquarters. Buchman, who once thanked “heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler,” expected the younger initiates to call him Uncle Frank; M.R.A. leaders demanded to know how often they masturbated.

In 1960, her father was selected to lead a missionary effort in what was then the Belgian Congo. As Bill settled into his new life in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), where he would spend nearly two decades, sometimes with Sandy, Jessie, Tina and Bettine, becoming the personal physician to the future president Mobutu Sese Seko — and helping contain the world’s first Ebola outbreak — Close, who moved back to Greenwich in 1962, was developing an interest in performance. After high school, she joined Up With People, an M.R.A.-affiliated troupe of singers and dancers. She prefers not to dwell on what she’s called those “lost years,” during which she was frequently belittled by adults in the group. “But they never got to me,” she says as she starts to cry. “They never broke me.” Close forgave her parents for M.R.A. long before they died. “I always thought, ‘Well, you know, we weren’t beaten, and we always had food and clothes on our backs.’ But it was a real kind of psychological abuse couched in underlying misogyny.”

At 22, she announced her plan to quit Up With People and go to college. A week later, Cabot Wade, a guitarist with whom she wrote songs, proposed. “He wouldn’t have done that without permission,” she says. “I always felt that it was a way to keep me from leaving.” The couple, who were briefly married, enrolled at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., where she studied anthropology and theater. Around that time, she had three separate nightmares. In the first, she was begging for forgiveness at a so-called Four Table while M.R.A. leaders forced her to confess her sins. In the next one, she denied their accusations. In the third, she stood up and said, “No. You’re wrong.” Then she walked away forever.

A FEW DAYS after our first meeting, as the final ovation for “Sunset Boulevard” fades, Close, who’s been brought backstage at New York’s St. James Theatre, is announced to Scherzinger and the rest of the cast over a loudspeaker: “Ladies and gentlemen: Norma Desmond!” The two actresses hug and pose for pictures, indifferent to the blood-red corn syrup drying on Scherzinger’s face. Close had never seen the musical, despite starring in it twice. She’s wearing a leopard-print coat over a black turtleneck and black pants, carefully chosen to attract just the right amount of attention. When the lights dimmed for Act I, she squeezed my arm and held her breath as if she were on the first incline of a roller coaster. Afterward, Close has notes about the staging (“impressive”), Scherzinger’s voice (“incredible”), the smoke (“not working”) and the male lead, Tom Francis (“sexy”); mainly, though, she’s just grateful, she says, to belong to this “alien nation” whose only purpose is to bring imaginary people to life.

William and Mary was, as Close puts it, “the beginning,” but her career started in 1974 on the New York stage. It wasn’t a glamorous time for her. She didn’t always have a dining table, so she’d sometimes eat on a board over the bathtub, joined by cockroaches. On one hot summer night, she sat at a window by the fire escape watching a neighbor typing naked at her desk. (“As she was thinking, she’d pluck her pubic hair!”) But each time she left the Hayes Theater after a performance of William Congreve’s Restoration comedy “Love for Love” — her first real job, even if she was an understudy — she felt, she says, as though “the sidewalks were paved with gold.” Lithgow, who was doing a play up the block, can pinpoint the moment she became a star. “Glenn had to go on for the leading lady, who was struggling to remember her lines,” he says. “And she absolutely nailed it.” For six years or so, Close lived and worked in the theater, spending nights out with fellow actors like Mary Beth Hurt, her best friend, and seeing as many shows as she could. Close was in the audience when Meryl Streep made her Broadway debut in a 1975 staging of “Trelawny of the Wells,” a 19th-century comedy by Arthur Wing Pinero about an actress who tries to give up the stage for love. “I remember thinking, ‘She’s going to affect my career,’” Close says.

In the early 1980s, the director George Roy Hill hired her for his adaptation of John Irving’s 1978 novel, “The World According to Garp,” because he’d seen her performance as Charity Barnum, the showman P.T. Barnum’s wife, in the musical “Barnum.” Even in her first film, as Garp’s mother, Jenny Fields, a nurse turned feminist guru, Close — whose lines include “I didn’t need his ring, Mother, I needed his sperm!” and “My son is not dog food, goddamn it!” — “never seemed to betray the slightest insecurity,” says Lithgow, who was cast as Roberta Muldoon, a transgender ex-football player. “Somehow or other, in her great roles, you just can’t imagine anybody else playing the part.” Close, who insists she was terrified, earned an Oscar nomination for that role and for her next two: as a bereaved baby boomer in “The Big Chill” (1983) and the childhood sweetheart of Robert Redford’s baseball player in “The Natural” (1984).

Having played a string of comparatively chaste parts, she had trouble convincing Adrian Lyne, the director of “Fatal Attraction”; Sherry Lansing and Stanley R. Jaffe, the film’s producers; and Douglas that she was strong or desirable enough to be Alex. “I’m not a classic beauty,” Close says. “I’m just not. I have a very uneven face.” Barbara Hershey, Lansing’s first choice, wasn’t available. Debra Winger, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange all were either considered or said no. Douglas, 81, who calls Close a “great all-around broad,” recalls her agent’s persistence. “We just didn’t think she was right,” he says. “But then she did her audition. She had a sensuality, an unpredictability and a danger that knocked us out.” Close, whose second marriage, to James Marlas, the founder of a private investment firm, would soon end in divorce, knew the part was hers to play. “They didn’t think I could be sexy,” she says. “My answer to that was, ‘Give me a sexy role.’”

An early cut famously ended with Alex taking her own life and framing Douglas’s character for murder. But in his 2017 book about Lansing, “Leading Lady,” the entertainment journalist Stephen Galloway writes that a movie executive said, “They want us to terminate the bitch with extreme prejudice.” Close, who didn’t know that she was pregnant during the shoot — and who’d sustain eye and nose infections after being dunked in water more than 50 times during the new bathtub showdown — was reluctant to encourage yet another archetype of female madness. (After much protest, she eventually relented when an actor friend told her, “You’ve made your point. Now go back to work.”) On her movies podcast, “You Must Remember This,” Karina Longworth said that straight men treated the film “like their own ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show,’” cheering when Alex was killed. “It took us on one hell of a ride,” says Douglas. “Neither of us had had that kind of commercial success before — or controversy. I’d go out and guys would get angry at me: ‘How could you do this to me?’”

After “Fatal Attraction,” Close proved she could handle any role, from Sunny von Bülow (1990’s “Reversal of Fortune”) to the Queen of Denmark (1996’s “Hamlet”) to a bearded pirate (1991’s “Hook”). “I sometimes think of actors as a Crayola box with a certain number of crayons,” says Lonny Price, 66, who directed Close in the 2017 Broadway revival of “Sunset Boulevard.” “Glenn’s the deluxe package with the sharpener in the back.” In 1993, she began rehearsals for Lloyd Webber’s musical adaptation of “Sunset Boulevard” at the Hollywood United Methodist Church in Los Angeles. In a diary she dug out for me, Close had written about the magnitude of the experience: “I’m the star of this huge show. … It’s on my shoulders. The voice, the face, the body language — the defiance and fragility and bravery of Norma. The size and the classiness of her spirit. The neediness, the self-absorption, the astounding power to manipulate. … Her blind joy thinking that her life is beginning again.” In a New York Times review, the theater critic David Richards wrote that Close “takes breathtaking risks, venturing so far out on a limb at times that you fear it will snap. It doesn’t.”

Following a successful Los Angeles run, Lloyd Webber asked Close to bring the show to New York. Patti LuPone, who had inaugurated the part in London and been promised the Broadway slot, sued for more than $1 million for breach of contract; she used some of the money to build a swimming pool that she called the Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Pool. (After reading a recent New Yorker profile of LuPone, which included negative comments about the actors Kecia Lewis and Audra McDonald — and, to a lesser degree, Close — and caused enough backlash for LuPone to issue a public apology, Close will say only, “It’s just too hard a profession to not have empathy for your fellow actors.”) Decades later, Lloyd Webber has no regrets. “It was a more nuanced performance, to put it mildly,” he says. Few productions are as steeped in lore: When it was announced that Close’s Los Angeles residency was winding down, Lloyd Webber — “who was drinking at the time,” says Close — had lunch with Faye Dunaway, who persuaded him to give her the West Coast show. But after hearing Dunaway sing, those in charge decided to cancel it altogether. “She couldn’t hit a note,” says Close. “The kids would come back from rehearsal like they’d been knocked over the head with a sledgehammer.”

When Close reprised the role some 20 years later, the character was different. So was she. After nine years of marriage, the actress, who laughs when asked if she’s currently dating anyone, had divorced her third husband, David E. Shaw, the chief executive of a private investment firm. She’d been 46 when she first put on Norma’s turban; now she was almost 70. During the earlier production, she was influenced by the actress Carol Matthau, who’d once been considered a glamorous ingénue. But as she got older, Matthau started powdering her face so much that her clothes looked like they’d been dipped in flour. “She saw herself as this young alabaster-skinned beauty,” says Close. “Everyone else saw an eccentric woman covered with white powder.” The second time around, Lloyd Webber felt that the character was even more tragic. “You knew that she wasn’t making the comeback,” he says. “And she knew.” Price noticed that Close seemed to connect to her on a personal level. “At a certain age, women become invisible to our culture,” he says. “I think she understood Norma’s pain a bit more, her loneliness and her desperation.” Although actors aren’t eligible to win a Tony for playing the same role twice (she keeps a fake one, a gift from Buffett, in her West Village apartment), The Times’s Ben Brantley praised Close for anchoring “one of the darkest visions that Hollywood ever summoned of itself.”

On her way out of the St. James Theatre, the same venue where she was discovered by Hollywood in “Barnum” nearly half a century ago, Close pauses in the corridor. Her eyes fill with tears. “I don’t know, I’m just finding this all quite emotional,” she says, dabbing at her cheeks with the fingers of her gloved hands. For a moment, Close and Norma seem to merge, and she laughs, either surprised by her own sentimentality or delighted by the sublime, almost scripted pageantry of it all. Then the stage door swings open, and the crowd on the sidewalk begins to cheer. She inhales deeply and, at 5-foot-3, stands a bit taller. Before ducking into a car, she turns to her fans and whispers, “I love you too.”

AMONG THE MANY mementos in Close’s home office in Bozeman — a figurine of Kala, the ape she voices in the 1999 animated film “Tarzan”; a picture of her singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a Mets game; her framed Oscar nomination certificates — one letter stands out. In 1973, Katharine Hepburn appeared on “The Dick Cavett Show.” Close, then a college senior, was struck, she’s said, by how much Hepburn “seemed to really know who she was.” When Close paid tribute to Hepburn at the Kennedy Center Honors in 1990, the actress sent her a thank-you note. “I’m glad I persuaded you when you were a mere child to join this terrible profession, this terrifying profession and, let’s face it, this delicious way to spend your life,” she wrote. “Glenn has a lot of pride about being a member of the acting community,” says her “All’s Fair” co-star Sarah Paulson, 50. “It’s not uncommon to see people with her level of success get jaded or cynical or no longer thrilled by the prospect of tackling a role. Glenn is as excited now as if it were her first day.”

In May, Close joined a few of her “All’s Fair” castmates at the Disney upfronts in New York, a marketing event for prospective advertisers. It was, one surmises, the opposite of everything she loves about acting. “I can’t wait to get home,” she tells me the next morning. “I’m so tired of all the [expletive] internet.” Before taking the role of Dina Standish, the firm’s matriarch, she wanted to be sure she wasn’t resurrecting Patty Hewes, the ruthless litigator she played for five seasons beginning in 2007 on the FX series “Damages.” To avoid comparisons, Close, who, unusually for her, signed on to “All’s Fair” without seeing a script, asked for Dina to be kind and in a loving marriage. (Murphy, who wasn’t available to comment, took Close’s suggestion that Standish’s husband, played by Ed O’Neill, should have prostate cancer.) At first, Close found it difficult to connect with the material, which could be quite “juicy,” as she puts it, or her co-stars. “I’m sure she told you how hard it was,” says Paulson. “Every set you walk onto is different. In Ryan’s world, you go big or go home.” To prevent the latter from happening, Kris Jenner, the show’s executive producer, invited the cast, which includes Niecy Nash-Betts, Teyana Taylor and Naomi Watts, to her Calabasas, Calif., mansion for a screening of “Fatal Attraction,” which Kardashian, also an executive producer of the show, had revealed she’d never seen. (“We all went around saying our favorite Glenn Close movie. I was like … ‘101 Dalmatians’?” Kardashian says.) The actresses were given matching Skims pajamas to wear, and Jenner organized a candy cart with cookies that had scenes from the movie on them. “It was like being on an acid trip,” says Paulson.

When the first season wrapped in March, Close raced back to Mooreland. “All the noise that our culture is now piling on us every single day, all the information, is overwhelming, and it can grind you to a halt,” she later said on Instagram. This fall, she’ll travel to Berlin to shoot a “Hunger Games” prequel, “Sunrise on the Reaping,” playing the malevolent Drusilla Sickle, and then to London for “An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good,” a limited series based on the Swedish author Helene Tursten’s stories about a woman who ends up killing those who annoy her. After that, she’ll return her attention, as ever, to “Sunset Boulevard.” The latest script, by Chris Terrio, who won the 2013 adapted screenplay Oscar for “Argo,” opens with a montage of Norma at the height of her fame. “You see what she was, and then you [meet] the woman,” Close says. Lloyd Webber, who also hopes it’ll get made, sounds more cautious. “What people have got to remember is that the rights to ‘Sunset Boulevard’ are very jealously guarded by Paramount because they regard the Billy Wilder movie as one of the jewels in their crown,” he says. “She’s tried, I’ve tried, everyone’s tried. Ultimately, it’s going to be their decision.” (A source at the studio, which has undergone multiple regime changes and a merger with Skydance Media since the film was in development, says there hasn’t been any recent movement on the project.)

Although she’s far from ready to admit defeat, Close knows that the odds are against her. “I’m now pretty sure that I won’t have enough time to do everything that I want,” she says soberly. I ask if her ambition still includes winning an Oscar. “I don’t dwell on it at all, but I’d like one,” she says. “In some weird way, it changes how people perceive you. And I’m looking at all the women in my peer group — they’ve all got one. Maybe I’ll get rolled out drooling in a wheelchair for some lifetime thing.” She laughs, and we sit for a moment with that image. “Look, I’m still in the room,” she adds. “To me, that’s more important.”

Some weeks later, my phone buzzes. Close, who’s spent most of the summer in Bozeman, has texted a video of the Montana sky, inky and menacing. “Something’s brewing,” she says over the recording. “Something’s brewing.” Since our very first exchange, Close has fully committed to playing an actress being interviewed, generously offering up versions of herself. But as I scroll through all the pictures and videos she’s sent — of Rory discovering his own reflection; Annie sitting with Pip by the creek; a bear in her neighbor’s backyard — I wonder if this is a cleaner take, her way of cutting through the noise. There’s something else she’d wanted to show me when I was in Bozeman: a large oil painting she commissioned decades ago that hangs over the sofa in her living room. In it, a young blond girl sits with a book and two dogs at her feet, looking off at a castle in the distance. I’d assumed that the child was meant to be Close, and imagined that the castle represented the M.R.A. headquarters she’d escaped from. But Close corrected me: “That’s Annie,” she said, who had nearly cried when she first saw it at age 3. “But where are you?” Annie had asked her mother. Picking up her daughter, Close smiled. “Don’t worry — I’m in the castle making you a sandwich.” All she had to do was find her way home.

Hair by Joey George at Streeters using Oribe. Makeup by Sara Tagaloa at Home Agency. Producer: Shay Johnson Studio. Photo assistants: Shen Williams-Cohen, Kyle Niego. Tailor: Olivia Niego. Manicurist: Alexa Groueff. Stylist’s assistant: Katey Kabu-Kubi