Sitting next to her man on a white garden bench, she edges closer and asks, “But Dale, why won’t you go out with me?” Now, a number of Sun readers may feel they know the answer to this one. Dale Winton and Melinda Messenger are core Sun people – a daytime TV star and a personality glamour model. So it’s sheer genius to cast them together in a stagey bower set against obvious green flats as a potential item Rather Pierre et Gilles in fact. And Close gives a startling image of what sunburn and privation can do to the face.

And yet, this is a movie we feel we’ve seen before – not least with Virginia McKenna in A Town Like Alice. Whereas Close has had it in her, a few times at least, as Alex Forrest, Mme de Merteuil and Norma Desmond, to make us feel we are seeing something new under the sun.’Paradise Road’ (15) opens on 5 Dec.. Is there any chance that she could do it in Alex Forrest’s hair – coloured red?Paradise Road is very moving, and Close is faultless as the prisoner of the Japanese who leads the camp-inmates’ vocal orchestra. This is a rare female ensemble, with fine but harrowing performances from Pauline Collins, Jennifer Ehle, Kate Blanchett, Frances McDormand and Julianna Margulies, among others. Hiring Sir Richard Eyre as their director, she and Meryl Streep will do a version of the Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots story, based on Schiller’s play but going their own way, in which Close will play the English queen. There is one larger project on the horizon, and it is a return to Bette Davis country.

But there is no question in the matter: Close is identified with the role of Norma. If there is ever a movie, no one else could intrude on its light, or make its madness so heroic.No matter the size and ego that Norma requires, Close is a trouper still: she does what is offered. And so it was her voice reading the girl’s diary in the documentary Anne Frank Remembered; and it was her playing the vice- president in what was plainly a Harrison Ford vehicle, Air Force One. It then played Los Angeles, where Close’s success was markedly greater than Lupone had enjoyed in London. But Lupone had been promised New York, and she had to be paid off (at least $1m) when Andrew Lloyd Webber and his backers opted for Close. Thus, the backstage melodrama was in many ways as great and exhausting as anything on stage. Remember that show had its world premiere in London, with Patty Lupone in the lead.

Immediate Family, in which she and James Woods (an unlikely union) sought to adopt the child of Mary Stuart Masterson and Kevin Dillon; Reversal of Fortune, where she took the comatose cameo of Sunny von Bulow, the wife whom Claus may have tried to murder; Hamlet, in which she was Gertrude to Mel Gibson, the mother only nine years older than the son; Meeting Venus, an excursion to Hungary for director Istvan Szabo, in which she played a Swedish singer rehearsing Tannhauser (this time she was dubbed – by Kiri Te Kanawa); a tiny role in Hook; doing her best in the disastrous The House of the Spirits, adapted from an Isabel Allende novel; Bette Davis-ish again as the fierce boss on The Paper; with a hooked nose and jutting jaw as Cruella de Vil; as the president’s daft, TV-addled wife in Mars Attacks!; and don’t forget her scabrous brother-keeper, looking like Punch’s Judy, in Mary Reilly.Of course, in the past few years, her movie work has been overshadowed by the immense challenge of Sunset Boulevard, the musical. Would you also credit that in 1987 she produced a documentary, Do You Mean There Are Still Real Cowboys?On the big screen, her choices might be regarded as wayward; but perhaps that is just the measure of her carefree and adventurous urging. And then, another four years later, with Barbra Streisand as her co-producer, Close took on Serving in Silence. Her pleasure over all these characters was evident on the small screen, and there was no chance of doing them (or anything like them) on the big screen. Three years later, she was in Sarah, Plain and Tall, playing a Maine teacher who goes to Kansas in 1910 to look after a widower (Christopher Walken) and his family That led to a sequel, Skylark, two years later. More recently, she has lived with Steve Beers, a carpenter she met during the production of Sunset Boulevard. None of which is to her discredit; that many affairs would only grace the resume of an actor.

Indeed, the record suggests a self- confidence in Glenn Close, as well as an emotional core that is hard to please. She goes her own way, and absorbs the consequences without fuss or self-pity.So, while she has not maintained her peak of the late 1980s, Close has displayed an uncommon zest to keep working. Earlier than many actresses, she plunged into television projects. In 1984, she and Ted Danson played parents in Something About Amelia, a groundbreaking story about a father who sexually molested his own child.