You’ve probably forgotten about this, but seven years ago, Glenn Close unveiled her chef d’oeuvre. Well, that was the idea, anyway. Albert Nobbs was that most desperately impassioned of passion projects, one that had been with her since she played the title role – a secretly transgender male butler in 19th-century Dublin – on stage in 1982, well before the actor was a household name. Several years and fruitless Oscar nominations later, around the turn of the century, she launched her quest to make it into a film. It would take over a decade, enduring financial collapse and a change of directors, but finally, in the autumn of 2011, Albert Nobbs debuted to festival audiences, presented as proudly by Close – its star, producer, co-writer and even composer of a dirgey closing-credits ballad – as if it were her newborn child.

There was one little problem: the film wasn’t very good. Stiff, musty and quaint-seeming in an era of more adventurous LGBT narratives, it was swiftly written off by critics as a well-meaning chore: competition for the pithiest variation on calling the film “a drag” was heated. Worse still, it wasn’t the anticipated career-crowning showcase for Close, whose heartfelt performance of gender confusion itself seemed repressed into inertia; most agreed the film was whipped out from under her by Janet McTeer’s rowdier, breast-flashing supporting performance as Nobbs’s male-identifying lover. Close got an Oscar nomination (her sixth), seemingly more as an A-for-effort gesture than anything else, but the win – widely predicted on paper by pundits before a frame of film was seen – eluded her once more. In a doubly cruel twist, Close’s routinely more celebrated peer Meryl Streep instead scored a third victory for her kabuki Maggie Thatcher, in a film scarcely more liked than Albert Nobbs.

It must have been a heart-sinking outcome for an actress whose substantial, wide-ranging career success – from creating the 1980s’ most genuinely iconic antiheroine in Fatal Attraction to headlining a blockbuster Disney franchise in 101 Dalmatians, winning multiple Emmys and Tonys along the way – never quite shook her film industry image as a respectable bridesmaid to brides like Streep. That wasn’t always to her disadvantage. It was Close’s slight skew-whiff form of movie stardom that allowed her to corner a market in formidable but not-fully-sympathetic female leads, whether as bunny-boiler Alex Forrest, Dangerous Liaisons’ scheming Madame Merteuil, Disney’s Cruella de Vil or, on the small screen, ball-breaking litigator Patty Hewes in Damages. But when, after Albert Nobbs, she joined Thelma Ritter in the Oscar record books as the most-nominated actress never to win, she seemed almost officially appointed as Hollywood’s dependable nearly-woman.

The story doesn’t end there. Last year, with little advance fanfare, Swedish director Björn Runge’s film The Wife premiered in the quiet back end of the Toronto film festival: another long-gestating project, having taken 14 years to reach the screen, it promptly earned Close some of the best notices of her career. Understandably so: she’s a silently brewing storm for much of this character portrait of Joan Castleman, the perennially sidelined wife of an acclaimed, conceited, womanising author, whose submissive reserve finally cracks to white-hot effect when they travel to collect his Nobel prize. It’s a study in self-sacrifice and belated self-realisation that plays at once to Close’s dual capacities for restraint and corrosive grandstanding: a performance that starts as an internalised full-body ache, before shaking itself triumphantly loose.

With more critics than just the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw declaring it a career high, the familiar sound of Oscar buzz immediately surged. Rather than putting her up against a more violently on-the-warpath Frances McDormand, however, distributors Sony Classics opted to wait a year: now, Close enters the best actress race as a known quantity and the incumbent favourite. The Wife is, in effect, the anti-Albert Nobbs: the firing-on-all-cylinders Close vehicle that nobody saw coming.

Jonathan Pryce and Glenn Close in The Wife. Photograph: Graeme Hunter/Graeme Hunter Pictures

Whether it lands her the trophy or meets another Close-but-no-cigar defeat remains to be seen. (If the latter, she’ll join Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole in the all-time losers club: not bad company to keep.) Awards season is in its infancy, with many unscreened possibilities, among them the tantalising possibility of Lady Gaga, the hotly hyped lead of Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born remake, becoming the second pop-world outlier to shimmy past Close to the podium, after Cher in 1987. If she or anyone else does, however, that wouldn’t stop The Wife being something of a win in itself for Close, not least for the ways in which – by accident or otherwise – it self-reflexively mirrors her own long-serving career narrative, rerouting it to a conclusion of emphatic victory. (It wouldn’t really fit The Wife’s low-key, grey-hued style to climax with Close’s character belting out The Greatest Showman’s chest-beating anthem This Is Me, but you would hardly begrudge her.)

Now 71, Close has referred to herself in interviews as a “late bloomer”, which may seem like actressy faux-modesty about a career that was hardly in the murk 30 years ago. Yet she does indeed seem newly invigorated in The Wife, snapping at her lines as hungrily as a young actor out to make an indelible first impression: perhaps the failure of the project that was supposed to be her finest hour gave Close a fresh start of sorts. Will she ever have a part this good again? Showcases like The Wife aren’t a dime a dozen even for actors a couple of decades younger than Close, knowledge that itself amplifies the film’s ticking-clock urgency. When it first screened a year ago, the #MeToo movement and Time’s Up had yet to hatch. Now, released into a rapidly more feminist-conscious industry landscape, The Wife, and Close’s tour de force performance in it, send a timely warning: don’t expect women to recede politely into the background, in Hollywood or otherwise.