Glenn Close accepts nonacting award: American Giving Award for her mental-illness activism
LOS ANGELES — Glenn Close has a
Tony Award, Emmy Award, Golden Globe and six Oscar nominations, but her
latest honor is among the most meaningful.
The 65-year-old actress will accept a special recognition at
the second annual American Giving Awards, to air Saturday (8 p.m. EST)
on NBC, for her work with Bring Change 2 Mind, a nonprofit organization
that aims to end the stigma of mental illness.
Close was inspired to help launch the group in 2009 after experiencing the challenges presented by mental illness in her family.
She talked with The Associated Press about what’s next for the charity — and for her.
AP: What led you to establish Bring Change 2 Mind?
Close:
Realizing that what I should have been giving all my nonprofit time to
was right under my nose in my own family. My sister is bipolar and my
nephew is schizoaffective. And because our family had really no
knowledge of or vocabulary for mental illness. (My sister) Jessie was
actually diagnosed after her son. I think if we had been more knowing as
a family, a lot of real suffering could have been avoided. ... And I’ve
always been as an actress very, very cognizant of the power of words
and how frightening some words can be and how they lose their power if
you just keep repeating them, and fling them out into the open. So
that’s basically what we decided to do.
AP: What progress has been made since 2009?
Close:
We’ve made great progress with our Facebook website community. I think
we’re being more and more known for a place where you can go to find
people who are dealing with the same thing you’re dealing with, where
you can tell your story, where you can have communication, the potential
of a fantastic community that can grow up around this. The Web is
perfect for this kind of thing because the person’s first step might be
to acknowledge, to take our pledge on Bring Change 2 Mind, to
acknowledge that they need help and to be able to articulate that on a
website rather than in person with anyone ... I think what we can do is
get the message out.
AP: How are attitudes toward mental illness changing?
Close:
That’s tricky because one really fascinating fact and the reason I stay
really committed to this is stigma is still pretty entrenched. ... The
most effective ways to change somebody’s prejudice and attitudes around
mental illness is to meet someone who actually has it and to realize
that they’re OK.
AP: How do cinematic depictions of mental illness affect perceptions?
Close:
If they’re positive like ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ — which I thought
was a wonderful movie — I think it’s very positive. It opens up the
dialogue. It’s all good, as far as I’m concerned. The tradition has been
to use mental illness as a plot device for violence, for just plain old
craziness, because that’s very easy. I mean, I was Alex Forrest in
‘Fatal Attraction.’ ... The amazing thing was when I was researching
that character, even the psychiatrists that I talked to never mentioned
the possibility of a mental disorder. And that was also before my sister
was diagnosed, so it wasn’t even in my radar screen. But now I think we
are getting more medically literate about all that, and I think it’s
fantastic that really good movies showing interesting people who are
coping with life and happen to have a mental disorder is great because
there’s one in four. It’s an astounding statistic. One in four people
across this globe are affected in some way by mental illness.
AP: How does this award help the cause?
Close:
It’s huge. You don’t see that many things about mental illness. ...
That shows that mental illness is not a comfortable thing for people to
talk about, and the fact that they are giving me this award and my
family — my sister, two of her children and my daughter are going to
come up with me — because I think the image of a family together
surrounding and supporting their members who have mental illness,
there’s no words for it. That’s where I’m so moved and honored by this
recognition and excited, actually, that we can put that image on
television.
AP: What’s next for you?
Close: I’m very
excited. I’m going to be doing, starting in February, a movie with Nick
Nolte. We play kind of a rock ‘n’ roll couple. He’s an iconic rock ‘n’
roll guy, singer-songwriter out of the Troubadour/Laurel Canyon
tradition ... that whole incredible generation of singer-songwriters,
and he’s of that ilk, and I’ve stuck with him through thick and thin,
and I won’t tell you the plotline, but I was very, very moved by the
story. I think it’s timely and really well written. I think it’s going
to be a lot of fun and it will have great music in it.
AP: What’s it called?
Close: ‘Always on My Mind.’
