In the early 1980s, the director George Roy Hill hired her for his adaptation of John Irving’s 1978 novel, “The World According to Garp,” because he’d seen her performance as Charity Barnum, the showman P.T. Barnum’s wife, in the musical “Barnum.” Even in her first film, as Garp’s mother, Jenny Fields, a nurse turned feminist guru, Close — whose lines include “I didn’t need his ring, Mother, I needed his sperm!” and “My son is not dog food, goddamn it!” — “never seemed to betray the slightest insecurity,” says Lithgow, who was cast as Roberta Muldoon, a transgender ex-football player. “Somehow or other, in her great roles, you just can’t imagine anybody else playing the part.” Close, who insists she was terrified, earned an Oscar nomination for that role and for her next two: as a bereaved baby boomer i
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