Fatal Attraction (1987) on Netflix
A married attorney, Dan Gallagher, begins an affair with Alex Forrest, an editor, while his wife and daughter are away. When he tries to end it, she will not let go.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb6.9/10112,991 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes74%
Trailer
Plot summary
Manhattan publishing attorney Dan Gallagher has a wife, Beth, and a daughter, Ellen. When Beth and Ellen go away to visit Beth's family, Dan begins an affair with Alex Forrest, an editor at a publishing house he deals with. She clings to him. He stays a second day, then tells her it is over. Alex cuts her wrists, and he bandages them before heading home. She arrives at his office to apologize and invites him to Madame Butterfly, her favorite opera, which he declines. He tells his secretary to stop putting her calls through. Alex keeps calling, and when she reaches him at home she says she is pregnant and intends to keep the child, arguing that he must take responsibility.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Fatal Attraction (1987)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Actresses kept refusing the part of Alex Forrest. Tracey Ullman and Olivia Hussey both said no because of the scene in which the character boils a pet rabbit, and Miranda Richardson turned it down as well, calling it hideous.
- Glenn Close chased the part: after several meetings with Jaffe in New York she was flown to Los Angeles to read with Michael Douglas. Impatient at pinning it up, she let her frizzy hair go wild and wore a slimming black dress, and Lansing said she came in looking completely different.
SPOILER
Close prepared by consulting several psychologists, who assured her Alex's behavior fitted someone abused as a child. She was concussed and taken to hospital while shooting her death scene, and only later discovered she had been pregnant during filming.SPOILER
In the original script Alex cut her own throat with the knife Dan had left on the counter so that he would be blamed for murder, and Beth cleared him by taking a cassette to the police. The film closed on a flashback of Alex dying to Madame Butterfly.SPOILER
Close fought the reshot ending for two weeks and only gave in after William Hurt talked her round. She later accepted the film would not have been as successful without it, because it gave audiences hope that the family would survive.- On 24 September 1988 it became the first film distributed directly in South Korea by an American company, United International Pictures. Korean directors, producers and distributors protested, and demonstrators threatened to release snakes in the cinemas, set fire to them and tear off the screens.
- The film put a phrase into the language: an obsessive, spurned woman is called a bunny boiler, after the scene in which Alex is found to have boiled the family's pet rabbit.
