It is rare for a film debut to feel like an arrival, but Glenn Close’s first screen performance in The World According to Garp does exactly that. As Jenny Fields, she plays a woman who refuses the life expected of her and, in doing so, shapes the strange, tender, and often tragic world of her son, the writer T.S. Garp. Close was in her mid-thirties when she took the role, yet she makes Jenny believable as a young nurse in the 1940s and as a celebrated feminist author decades later. The performance earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress and set the standard for everything that followed: intelligence, independence, and a complete absence of vanity.
The film, directed by George Roy Hill from John Irving’s beloved novel, follows Garp, played by Robin Williams, from his unusual conception to his career as a writer, husband, and father. Garp’s story is filled with eccentric characters, sudden violence, and dark comedy, but Jenny is its moral anchor. She is a nurse who decides she wants a child but not a husband. She chooses a dying soldier as the father, raises Garp alone, and later writes an autobiography that becomes an unlikely feminist manifesto. Women flock to her, men misunderstand her, and Garp spends much of his life trying to understand a mother who will not be contained by his needs.
Close plays Jenny without sentimentality. In the early scenes, she is practical and watchful, a woman who has learned to observe people closely in a hospital ward. She does not perform rebellion for applause. Her decision to have a child on her own terms is presented as calm, almost clinical, and therefore more radical. Close lets us see the thinking behind the choice: Jenny has watched marriages curdle, she values her work and her freedom, and she will not trade them for respectability. That clarity gives the later fame a bitter edge. When Jenny becomes famous, she is claimed by a movement she never quite joined on its terms, and Close shows the weariness of a private person turned into a symbol.
A Mother and a Son
The heart of the film is the relationship between Jenny and Garp. Robin Williams, best known then for comedy, gives a surprisingly restrained performance, and Close matches him with warmth that never becomes cloying. Their scenes together have a rhythm of affection and exasperation. Garp loves his mother fiercely but resents her independence and her public life. Jenny loves her son but will not apologise for the choices that made him who he is. Close plays that tension with great subtlety. A glance, a pause before answering, a refusal to explain herself twice — these small choices tell us that Jenny has already fought this battle internally and won it.
Hill directs the story with a lightness that keeps its darker turns from overwhelming the humour. The film moves through decades, from wartime New England to Vienna to a New England home filled with wounded women whom Jenny shelters. Through it all, Close ages Jenny not with heavy makeup tricks but with changes in posture, voice, and confidence. The young nurse is brisk and contained. The older Jenny is more expansive in public and more tired in private. It is a complete portrait, not a collection of scenes, and it is astonishing that it was achieved by a newcomer to film.
What Close understood, even then, was that Jenny is not a saint. She can be self-absorbed, stubborn, and blind to the dangers around her. Her openness to the women who seek her out, including the Ellen Jamesians, a group whose radical protest against violence takes a disturbing form, shows both her compassion and her naivety. Close does not smooth over those contradictions. She lets Jenny be generous and wrong, brave and careless, in the same breath. That honesty is what makes the character’s fate so affecting. When violence finally reaches Jenny, it feels not like a plot twist but like the cost of living openly in a world that punishes women who do.
Why the Role Still Matters
The World According to Garp arrived at a moment when Hollywood was still learning how to portray feminist ideas on screen without turning them into caricature. Jenny Fields could easily have become either a heroine on a pedestal or a joke. Close avoids both traps. She plays a woman who writes about her body, her work, and her choices with plainspoken directness, and she lets the audience decide what to make of her. The film’s humour helps: Jenny is funny, often unintentionally, because she takes herself seriously in a world that does not. Close finds that comedy without undermining the character’s dignity.
For Close herself, the role was a declaration of intent. She had already proved herself on stage, winning attention on Broadway, but film stardom often demands a narrower kind of beauty or charm. Jenny required something else: authority, wit, and the ability to hold the screen opposite a charismatic male lead without competing for laughs. Close did it by being still when others were busy, by listening, and by trusting that an intelligent woman is interesting enough on her own. Casting directors noticed. Within a few years she would play wives, lawyers, lovers, and queens, each distinct, each grounded in the same disciplined approach first visible here.
Watching the film today, Jenny Fields feels strikingly modern. She insists on bodily autonomy, on a career, on raising a child without a husband, and on writing her own story rather than letting others write it for her. She also learns that fame does not protect you, that good intentions can have unforeseen consequences, and that love for a child does not resolve every disagreement. Close captures all of that in a performance that never raises its voice to make a point. It is a debut of remarkable maturity, and it remains one of the finest introductions any screen actress has ever given.
If you watch only one early Glenn Close performance, make it this one. It contains, in miniature, the qualities that would define her career: moral seriousness without preachiness, emotional precision, and a refusal to ask the audience for pity. Jenny Fields is not a perfect mother or a perfect feminist icon. She is a person, fully imagined, and Close’s achievement is to make us feel we have known her for a lifetime in less than two and a half hours.