Law in Popular Culture

Glenn Close as Attorney: Scarier Than 'Fatal Attraction'

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Actress Glenn Close, playing a plaintiffs attorney in the television drama Damages, is now winning new fans on the other side of the pond.

Even scarier than she was in her infamous role in Fatal Attraction, playing the deranged paramour of a married Manhattan lawyer who thought he’d signed on for a no-strings weekend fling, she is a major reason why Damages is “a cult in the making,” reports the London Times.

“With two episodes to go, the thing that keeps you rooted, and open-mouthed, is Glenn Close as Patty Hewes,” a prosecutor whose “intense ruthlessness is somehow scarier than her bunny-boiling turn in Fatal Attraction, particularly in her twisting and twisted relationship with young intern Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne),” the newspaper recounts. It describes Damages as “a complicated … drama about a serpentine legal case involving the shady billionaire Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson, with white bouffant) and a tangled web of insider trading, murder and illicit sex.”

Originally broadcast last year as an FX cable television series, the program is now being televised by the BBC, the news agency notes.

A Wall Street Journal Law Blog reviewer last year was more measured in her praise of the show, as discussed in an earlier ABAJournal.com post. “Some of us find it ridiculously compelling,” says Ashby Jones. “Others of us find it, well, just ridiculous.”

Updated at 10:47 a.m. March 26 to indicate that Close plays a plaintiffs attorney.

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