It looks like Glenn Close‘s Oscar campaign will begin in Toronto where Albert Nobbs will have its world premiere. The film, directed by Rodrigo Garcia (Mother and Child) finds Close playing a woman posing as a man in order to find work and survive in 19th Century Ireland. It’s a role not unfamiliar to Close as she played the same character in an Off-Broadway interpretation of the story and won an Obie for her performance back in 1982. 29 years, and five Oscar nominations without a win, later and Close is now producing the film adaptation which she co-wrote with Man Booker prize-winning author John Banville.
Already this year is shaping up to be quite the battle with Close and Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady) poised for a showdown. There are other actresses, of course, vying for Oscar’s Best Actress (did someone say Rachel Weisz?), but we’ll talk more about that later. For now let me offer you a couple more looks at Albert Nobbs as well as the film’s full synopsis.
Following the film’s Toronto premiere, Liddell Entertainment and Roadside Attractions will release it fourth quarter 2011. The film co-stars Brendan Gleeson, Janet McTeer, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Aaron Johnson and Mia Wasikowska.
A witty Irish-set period drama about the lives of staff at Dublin’s most luxurious hotel: the illegitimate child of a maid, a beautiful couple’s impossible love, and Albert…a woman who pretends to be a man to survive.
19th Century Ireland: for a woman to be independent and single, she must deceive everyone — by pretending to be a man. Albert, a shy butler who keeps himself to himself, has been hiding deep secret for years — ‘he’ is a woman who has had to dress and behave as a man all her life in order to escape a life of poverty and loneliness.
When a handsome painter Hubert Page arrives at the hotel, Albert is inspired to try and escape the false life she has created for herself. She gathers her nerve to court beautiful, saucy young maid Helen in whom she thinks she’s found a soul-mate — but Helen’s eye is on a new arrival: handsome, bad-boy Joe, the new handy-man.
As Albert dares to hope that she might one day live a normal life, we catch a glimpse of a free-spirited woman who is caught in the wrong time…
The 2011 Toronto International Film Festival plays from September 8-18. For my complete coverage click here.
