Glenda Veronica Close (born March 19, 1947) is an American actress, singer and film producer. She began her professional stage career in 1974 in Love for Love, and was mostly a New York stage actress through the rest of the 1970s and early 1980s, appearing in both plays and musicals, including the Broadway productions of Barnum in 1980 and The Real Thing in 1983, for which she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.
Her film debut was in The World According to Garp (1982), which she followed up with supporting roles in The Big Chill (1983) and The Natural (1984); all three earned her nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She would later receive nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performances in Fatal Attraction (1987), Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and Albert Nobbs (2011). She won two more Tony Awards in the 1990s, for Death and the Maiden in 1992 and Sunset Boulevard in 1995, while she won her first Emmy Award for the 1995 TV film Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story.
She starred as Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 2003 TV film The Lion in Winter, winning a Golden Globe Award. In 2005 she starred in the drama series The Shield. Then, from 2007 to 2012, she starred as Patty Hewes in the FX drama series Damages, a role that won her a Golden Globe and two Emmys. She has voiced the character of Mona Simpson in the animated sitcom The Simpsons since 1995. She returned to Broadway in November 2014, in a revival of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance. Her other films include Jagged Edge (1985), Hamlet (1990), Reversal of Fortune (1990), 101 Dalmatians (1996), Paradise Road (1997), Air Force One (1997), Cookie's Fortune (1999), Heights (2005), Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and The Girl With All The Gifts (2016).
Close is a six-time Academy Award nominee, tying the record for being the actress with the most nominations never to have won (along with Deborah Kerr and Thelma Ritter). As of 2018, Close has more Oscar nominations without a win than any other living actor. In addition, she has been nominated for four Tonys (three wins), fourteen Emmys (three wins), thirteen Golden Globes (two wins), two Drama Desk Awards (one win) and eight Screen Actors Guild Awards (one win). She has also won an Obie award and has been nominated for three Grammy Awards and a BAFTA. Close has received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and has been inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.