If Fatal Attraction showed Glenn Close as a woman undone by desire, Dangerous Liaisons shows her as a woman who has mastered it — or believes she has. As the Marquise de Merteuil, Close presides over Stephen Frears’s glittering, cruel adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel, a story of aristocrats who treat love as a game and discover, too late, that the game has real casualties. Close’s Merteuil is witty, brilliant, and terrifyingly controlled, and the performance earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. It is widely considered one of the greatest screen performances of the 1980s.
The film is set in pre-revolutionary France, in a world of powdered hair, silk gowns, whispered letters, and elaborate manners. The Marquise and her former lover, the Vicomte de Valmont, played by John Malkovich, are bored, sophisticated, and amoral. They make a wager: Valmont must seduce the virtuous Madame de Tourvel, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, while the Marquise pursues revenge on a former lover by corrupting his young fiancée, Cécile, played by Uma Thurman. What begins as sport becomes tragedy, as genuine feeling intrudes on cynical plans. Valmont falls in love with Tourvel; Cécile is ruined; the Marquise, who prided herself on never being caught feeling anything, is exposed.
Close’s Merteuil is the film’s intelligence. She understands her society perfectly: a woman of her rank cannot openly pursue power, money, or sexual freedom, so she must pursue them through reputation, gossip, and manipulation. Her famous monologue, explaining how she taught herself to control her face, to smile while thinking something else, to use society’s rules against itself, is a masterclass in acting. Close delivers it not as a villain’s boast but as a woman’s autobiography — the story of a girl who realised early that the world would punish her for honesty and reward her for performance. It is funny, chilling, and, in its own way, feminist. Merteuil is not evil for its own sake; she is a strategist in a rigged game.
Manners as Armour
Frears directs with elegant restraint, letting Christopher Hampton’s Oscar-winning screenplay do its work through dialogue that is sharp enough to cut. The costumes and production design are lavish, but they never overwhelm the performances. Close uses the period setting brilliantly. Her Merteuil moves through ballrooms and bedrooms with total command of posture, fan, and glance. A raised eyebrow dismisses a suitor; a pause before a reply signals a calculation; a perfectly timed laugh conceals a threat. Close had the stage training to make such manners feel lived-in rather than decorative, and she makes the Marquise’s control feel like both a talent and a prison.
The chemistry between Close and Malkovich is central. They play former lovers who know each other’s tricks too well to be fooled, yet who still enjoy the game. Their scenes are duels conducted in polite language, full of double meanings and shared jokes. When their alliance breaks, it breaks over pride and jealousy, not over morality. Close shows Merteuil’s fury at being outmanoeuvred, but she also shows a flicker of something rarer: hurt that Valmont chose Tourvel’s sincerity over her own brilliance. That hurt is the crack in the armour, and Close lets it show only for a moment before the mask returns. It is that moment that makes the character tragic rather than merely monstrous.
Michelle Pfeiffer’s Tourvel provides the moral contrast. Where Merteuil performs virtue, Tourvel embodies it, and her suffering is real and unadorned. Close plays against Pfeiffer with great generosity, never trying to outshine her but instead making Merteuil’s cruelty clearer by contrast. When Merteuil finally loses — exposed, disfigured by smallpox in the novel’s terms and, in the film, publicly humiliated at the opera — Close’s final scene is devastating. She removes her makeup in front of a mirror, and for the first time we see the woman beneath the performance: ageing, alone, and stripped of the reputation that was her only power. It is a wordless, unforgettable image, and it confirms that Close understood Merteuil not as a villain to be punished but as a woman to be understood, even as she is condemned.
A Performance for the Ages
Dangerous Liaisons won three Academy Awards and was nominated for Best Picture, and Close’s performance has only grown in reputation since. Actresses and directors cite it as a model of how to play intelligence on screen: not by indicating cleverness, but by thinking visibly, by listening, by choosing words with lethal precision. The Marquise is a role that could easily become camp or caricature in lesser hands. Close makes her modern. Her struggle — to be taken seriously in a world that values her appearance over her mind, to control her own story when society wants to write it for her — resonates far beyond 18th-century France.
For Close, the role completed an extraordinary three-year run from Jagged Edge through Fatal Attraction to Dangerous Liaisons, each film exploring desire, power, and deception from a different angle. Merteuil is the culmination: a woman who has turned desire into strategy and who discovers that strategy cannot protect her from feeling. It remains, for many critics, her finest film performance, and it is essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand why Glenn Close is regarded as one of the great screen actresses of her generation.
One final detail deserves attention: Close’s use of stillness in this film. While other characters flutter, gossip, and scheme aloud, Merteuil often simply watches, and her watching is an act of power. She gathers information the way a general gathers intelligence, and when she finally speaks, her words land with the force of a decision already made. That quality — patience as strategy — is what separates Merteuil from the more impulsive schemers around her, and it is what makes Close’s performance feel so modern, even in period dress.