Glenn Close has revealed that before she went on to become an award-winning actress, she spent most of her childhood growing up in communes with a religious cult.
“I wouldn’t trust any of my instincts because [my beliefs] had all been dictated to me,” she said of her time with the Moral Re-Armament, founded by American minister Frank Buchman in the late 1930s, The Hollywood Reporter said.
The MRA, which is now called “Initiatives of Change,” held firmly to what it called “the four absolutes”: honesty, purity, unselfishness and love.
“I haven’t made a study of groups like these,” Miss Close told The Hollywood Reporter. “But in order to have something like this coalesce, you have to have a leader. You have to have a leader who has some sort of ability to bring people together, and that’s interesting to me, because my memory of the man who founded it was this wizened old man with little glasses and a hooked nose in a wheelchair.”
Miss Close said she was 7 years old when her father, William Taliaferro Close, took her, her brother and two sisters away from their family estate in Connecticut and moved them to the group’s headquarters in Caux, Switzerland. He then left his family there to practice medicine in Congo.
“They had a big hotel, a very glamorous, exclusive hotel called Mountain House, which I think is in one of Fitzgerald’s novels,” she recalled. “[They] made it into one of their world headquarters, and we stayed there for two years.
“You basically weren’t allowed to do anything, or you were made to feel guilty about any unnatural desire,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “If you talk to anybody who was in a group that basically dictates how you’re supposed to live and what you’re supposed to say and how you’re supposed to feel from the time you’re 7 ’til the time you’re 22, it has a profound impact on you. It’s something you have to [consciously overcome], because all of your trigger points are [wrong].”
Miss Close reportedly broke away from the MRA when she was 22, attending the College of William & Mary in Virginia to study theater.
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
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