It’s hard to imagine anyone who could upstage Glenn Close, but the actress’ sister Jessie may have done just that.
The siblings appeared together on Wednesday at the Mental Health HOPE Symposium on Capitol Hill. While Glenn Close could discuss the characters she had played who probably suffered from mental illness (namely, Alex Forrest from “Fatal Attraction”), her sister was able to talk about having bipolar disorder in real life.
“I felt that the only way to get better, the only way to be released was to kill myself,” Jessie Close said during one of the more jaw dropping parts of her speech. “I believed completely that my family would be better off without me.”
Glenn shed some light on the way her family dealt with Jessie’s illness. “Jessie and I are the 12th generation of stiff upper lipped, pull up your socks, do it, don’t talk about it, for God sake don’t show anything, suck it up, work hard, don’t complain, make money, don’t spend it, always polish your shoes Connecticut Yankees, with absolutely no vocabulary for mental illness,” she explained. “Going to a psychiatrist was unthinkable, I mean we were from Greenwich, Conn., not from New York,” she laughed.
She explained that is why, in part, it took so long for her family to realize that Jessie was “something other than irresponsible.” “I’m ashamed to say it took awhile to sink it,” she admitted.
Now she knows better, and has become a well known mental health advocate. She even thinks more deeply about those characters she’s played.
“Cruella, she’s just the devil,” she laughed. “When I did Alex Forrest I still would have played her, but I probably would have been more aware of what she might have been suffering from.”
And those comparisons made between Alex Forrest and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 campaign? A big no-no says Close. “Yeah, it was so off, so off,” she said. “I admire Hillary tremendously, she’s certainly not Alex Forrest.” So would she play her then? “It depends on the script, if it was a great script and I thought it was something worth doing, than yeah, I’d certainly consider it.”
