Glenn Close (born March 19, 1947) is an American actress and singer of stage and screen, perhaps best known for her role as deranged stalker Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction (1987). She has been nominated five times for an Oscar, and has won three Tonys, an Obie, four Emmys, two Golden Globes, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.

Close was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, the daughter of Bettine (née Moore) and William Taliaferro Close, a doctor who operated a clinic in the Belgian Congo and served as a personal physician to President Mobutu Sese Seko. Her parents came from prominent families; her paternal grandfather, Edward Bennett Close, a stockbroker and director of the American Hospital Association, was first married to Post Cereals' heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, making Glenn Close a relative of screenwriter/director Preston Sturges and actress Dina Merrill. Close is also a second-cousin once-removed of Brooke Shields. Shields's great-grandmother Mary Elsie Moore (wife of Don Marino Torlonia, 4th Prince di Civitella-Cesi) was Close's great-aunt, a sister of Close's maternal grandfather, Charles Arthur Moore.

In a speech at Princeton University on February 19, 2009, Close credited her early years for her acting abilities: "I have no doubt that the days I spent running free in the evocative Connecticut countryside with an unfettered imagination, playing whatever character our games demanded, is one of the reasons that acting has always seemed so natural to me." However, when she was seven years old, her parents "were seduced into a cult group called Moral Re-Armament.... Our family was swallowed up by MRA for 15 years. We moved into a series of communal centers, and.... struggled to survive the pressures of a culture that dictated everything about how we lived our lives." Close traveled for several years in the mid-to-late 1960s with an MRA singing group called "Up With People" and attended Rosemary Hall, a boarding school in Wallingford, Connecticut. When she was 22, Close broke away from MRA. "I rebelled and said I wanted to go to college.... Until then, my life was completely out of my control. I didn't have the tools to reclaim it. That reclamation began when I entered The College of William and Mary." It was there in the theater department that she began to train as a serious actor under Dr. Howard Scammon. She was elected to membership in the honor society of Phi Beta Kappa.