Glenn Close Opens Up About Her Time in a Cult

77-year-old Glenn Close has enjoyed a successful acting career, starring in films such as Fatal Attraction, The Big Chill, Dangerous Liaisons and many more. But her life wasn’t always so wonderful. When she was just seven years old, her parents joined the cult Moral Re-Armament (MRA), which believed that people had to re-arm themselves in a 1950s post-war world, during which time they lived on a 277-acre farm in New York called Dellwood with many other families. Suddenly, Close and her siblings often found themselves alone with the other members, and looked after by young women in the cult when her parents would go on worldwide MRA missions.

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By 1960, her parents moved the family again, this time to the MRA headquarters in Switzerland. Eventually, they returned to the States, and it was there that Close fell in love with acting and started appearing in plays put on by her school’s drama club. As she grew up, she remained in the MRA, joining their singing group and falling in love with a guitarist.

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However, things began to change when she toured colleges to try to recruit people into the MRA. She felt the students looked at her as if she were crazy. In 1970, she decided that she wanted to go to college, broke away from the MRA and divorced the man she had married in the cult. Attending college helped her fall more in love with acting and gain the confidence to pursue her dreams.
Close admitted that she gained a lot of confidence from watching others in the field, particularly Katharine Hepburn, who always appeared confident in interviews and onscreen. She said that watching her lit a fire in her that remains to this day. Now learn more about other stars who were in dangerous cults:

1950s Musicals
November 2020
Bright and brassy, toe-tapping musicals from the 1950s
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