Glenn Close Reveals How She Survived Childhood in a Cult

When growing up in what she’s described as a cult, actress Glenn Close relied on her “active imagination” to not let certain situations affect her as “deep” as they could have.

While reflecting on her prolific 50-year career in theater and film with Willie Geist on TODAY’s Sunday Sitdown, Close got candid on how she came to be an actress despite her, as Geist put it, “eccentric upbringing.”

“I’m still working it out,” Close pondered. “From a very early age when we were running feral in the Connecticut countryside, I always had an incredibly active imagination. I think I could take myself out of situations sometimes with my imagination, and not let it get into me as deep as it might have.”

“I think that’s what literally kept me on course of doing what I wanted to do at a very early age, which was to be an actress,” she continued.

Born in Greenwich, Connecticut, Close moved to a commune when she was seven after her father, Dr. William Taliaferro Close, joined the Moral Re-armament movement, a religious group founded by American churchman Frank N.D. Buchman in 1922. The family later moved to the group’s headquarters in Switzerland.

The Fatal Attraction star previously opened up about her upbringing during an appearance on Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry’s AppleTV+ series, The Me You Can’t See, in 2021, detailing the emotional scars and “trauma” she was left with.

“From when I was 7 to when I was 22, I was in this group called MRA. And, it was basically a cult,” Close said in the show’s fifth episode. “Everybody spouted the same things and there’s a lot of rules, a lot of control.”

“Because of how we were raised, anything that you thought you would do for yourself, was considered selfish,” she continued. “I mean, it’s astounding that something that you went through at such an early stage in your life still has such a potential to be destructive. I think that’s childhood trauma.”