With Glenn Close made up as a 19th-century Dublin woman who's spent decades passing as a man, Albert Nobbs was an Oscar contender before anyone had seen a frame of it. But there's more to the movie's substance than the Academy's predictable preference for ostentatious transformation. Close, who first played the part off-Broadway nearly 30 years ago, spent 15 years developing the project for herself. Considering that it's a sweetheart role, that's not surprising, but in my interview with Close, her co-star and good friend Janet McTeer, and director Rodrigo Garcia for the Los Angeles Times, I push the theory that Close's attachment to the part has at least something to do with the fact that when she was 7, her parents joined a quasi-religious order called Moral Re-Armament, a cult-like organization whose most visible aspect was the eerily peppy singing group Up With People. (Or, as The Simpsons would have it, "Hooray for Everything!") Close has never talked about that 15-year period of her life much, and didn't exactly break protocol for me, but she let just a little light shine on why the part she's spent so long pursuing is a woman who spends her life hiding from the world.
