After completing college, Close sought opportuni-
ties to work as an actor. In 1974, she obtained a posi-
tion with New York’s Phoenix Theater, and her career
was launched. Her first Broadway show was the 1974
production ofLove for Love. In 1976, she appeared in
the musicalRex. It was the musicalBarnum(1980),
however, that sent her to Hollywood. Director George
Hill was taken with her performance and offered her
a role inThe World According to Garp(1982).
Close was featured in seven major films and three
television specials during the 1980’s, includingThe
Big Chill(1983),The Natural(1984), andDangerous
Liaisons(1988). In two other films—Greystoke: The
Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) and
Gandahar(1988;Light Years)—she dubbed the lines
of Andie McDowell. On Broadway, in addition to
Barnum, she appeared in Tom Stoppard’sThe Real
Thing(1983), for which she won a Tony Award, and
Benefactors(1985). However, it was her performance
as the dangerously obsessive Alex Forrest in the
thrillerFatal Attraction(1987) that firmly established
Close as one of Hollywood’s biggest and most glam-
orous stars, and by the end of the decade she had
been nominated for two Academy Awards for Best
Actress and one for Best Supporting Actress. It was
not surprising, therefore, that in 1988 she won the
People’s Choice Award.
Impact Close was a versatile actor whose talent
served her well both on stage and on screen, but her
fame and reputation in the late 1980’s resulted
largely from her portrayals of villains Alex Forrest
and the marquise de Merteuil inDangerous Liaisons.
Her glamour was thus tempered by a willingness to
play unsavory characters that was somewhat unusual
for top-tier screen actors. She would continue in the
next decade to embrace such radically different
roles as Gertrude inHamlet(1990) and Cruella De
Vil in101 Dalmations(1996).
Further Reading
Thomas, David.A Biographical Dictionar y of Film.3d
ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Wilmeth, Don B., and Christopher Bigsby.Post World
War II to the 1990’s.Vol.3inThe Cambridge Histor y
of American Theatre. New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2006.
August W. Staub
See also Big Chill, The;Fatal Attraction; Film in the
United States; Television; Theater.
Closing of the American Mind,
The
Identification Best-selling critique of liberal arts
education and the American university system
Author Allan Bloom (1930-1992)
Date Published in 1987
Bloom developed a coherent conservative philosophy of
higher education and presented it as a sociopolitical criti-
cism of American intellectual culture since World War II.
Allan Bloom asserted inThe Closing of the American
Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy
(1987) that American education, especially higher
education, had abandoned its classical values in the
humanities and social sciences. Rather than follow-
ing its former ideal of the rigorous study of “great
books,” well-defined curricula, and historically sig-
nificant Western ideas, higher education—Bloom
said—espoused trendy authors, experimental cur-
ricula, and dangerous new ideas. It had uncritically
elevated the popular, tantalizing, and ignoble above
the erudite, sublime, beautiful, and complex.
The disinterested search for absolute truth, which
Bloom claimed had motivated the Academy since the
time of René Descartes and John Locke, had since the
1960’s been superseded by the denial of absolute
truth, which Bloom associated with postmodernism.
Bloom aligned himself with Socrates, Plato, and Aris-
totle, whom he saw as serious seekers of truth, and
he opposed contemporary academics whom he por-
trayed as comparing and understanding various
points of view without evaluating them objectively. He
held that such indiscriminate toleration of other
points of view led to a lack of discernment, which ren-
dered the quest for truth impossible. Mounting a
wholesale attack on both conservative and leftist phi-
losophers of the twentieth century, Bloom rejected
both analytic philosophy and deconstruction, be-
cause he believed that they both trivialized the monu-
mental philosophical agenda that had occupied Soc-
rates, Plato, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The deconstructionist
method of Jacques Derrida, he claimed, was the last
nail in the coffin of reason.
Bloom traced his own intellectual lineage to the
distinctive conservatism of the eighteenth century
Enlightenment, which he saw as characterized by ab-
solutism and keen judgment. He decried the rise of
multiculturalism and linked it to moral and culturalThe Eighties in America Closing of the American Mind, The 219