Glenn Close opens up about childhood in cult

Actress Glenn Close. Photo / Getty Images

Acclaimed actress Glenn Close has opened up about her childhood spent in a right-wing religious cult.

The 67-year-old told The Hollywood Reporter how she was seven when her dad, a Harvard-educated doctor, joined the group known as Moral Re-Armament (MRA), sweeping her family away from life as they knew it.

Their family moved from her grandfather's Connecticut estate to the group's headquarters in Switzerland, where they stayed for two years while her dad, Dr William Taliaferro Close, worked in Congo.

She remained in the cult until she was 22 and says for years after she was unable to trust her instincts, because all her beliefs were dictated to her.

"You basically weren't allowed to do anything, or you were made to feel guilty about any unnatural desire," she told the industry publication for the cover issue.

"If you talk to anybody who was in a group that basically dictates how you're supposed to live and what you're supposed to say and how you're supposed to feel, from the time you're 7 til the time you're 22, it has a profound impact on you.

"It's something you have to (consciously overcome) because all of your trigger points are (wrong)."

Close left MRA in 1970 and went onto success as an actress in films such as Fatal Attraction and will soon return to Broadway in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance.

"Many things led me to leave," she says of MRA. "I had no toolbox to leave, but I did it."

Glenn Close in the film Fatal Attraction.

Close says she wish she better knew her father, who went to Congo when he was 36 and stayed for 16 years, trying to bring modern healthcare to the country and fight the Ebola epidemic.

Any ill feelings she may have had toward him because of MRA, she's moved on from.

"I always thought, the way life works, the burden of forgiveness is on the child," she says.

"Forgiveness is probably the most revolutionary concept there is right now in our world. Because without forgiveness, you just perpetuate what has been before."

- AAP