Discreet Eric Close
By Thomas Gaetner, Télé 7 Jours, 2006	Home   Cette page en Français

He does not have anything of the Hollywood star, except an elegant physique. Reliable, solid, discreet, almost unobtrusive, he defrays the chronicle neither by his love escapades, nor by his misdemeanours. With his wife, the same one for ten years, he makes catechism and raises two wise children. In the TV show Without a Trace, Eric Close plays the good-looking and dark agent Martin Fitzgerald. This New-Yorker looking like the first of his prom, perfect white smile and electric blue eyes, is at the image of his fiction character. In the same time careful and determined. In spite of a look-like half-Robert Redford, half-Pierce Brosnan, the actor suffered for a long time before causing the enthusiasm of the unconditional fans of this success show. His preceding appearances, marked by successive failures (McKenna, Dark Skies or The Magnificient Seven), prevent him from launching him in a promising career. However, by obtaining the part of Sawyer Walker in the soap Santa Barbara (1992), Eric Closed, then 27 years old, theoretically opens the doors of notoriety. This is a failure. "That enabled me to remain humble", he entrusted with wisdom to a French daily newspaper.

Contrarily to his character of Martin Fitzgerald in Without a Trace, he does profit of any help. Even if his name can let suppose a family tie with sublime Glenn Close, it is not the case. Son of a father who was a orthopaedic surgeon, Eric discovers very early a passion for the acting play. For directing too. However, he wisely continues his studies of communication started at the University of California.

And when he meets Keri, a welfare worker, he marries her at once to make her the mother of their two children, Katie and Ella. This marriage goes on well, Eric Close puts a point of honor to honour his role of father and husband. "When I do not work, he says, I want to be able to spend all my free time with my wife and my children." Very religious he expresses his faith through various missions of catholic mutual aid. It even happens to him sometimes, in more of his autograph, to add : "I can all by the One who fortifies me" (a verse of the Philippians epistle 4.3). "I do not do it systematically, he entrust, but it happens to me in front of people having lived a difficult experiment."

Eric Close says to get nourished from his professional (relative) failures. But Without a Trace is today the object of his great pride, as well as Taken, the series produced by Spielberg, where he played a nice alien. Resolutely turned towards the future, the actor does not hide any more his greatest desire of passing behind the camera. It is said that he could direct an episode of the 5th season of Without a Trace. He will also star, with Kevin Bacon, in a short film entitled Saving Angelo, directed and written by a small wonder, Dominic Scott Kay (seen in Without a Trace), only 10 years old. Just to prove to himself, if he still needs it, that, in life, everything is possible...