SCOTT GLENN Biography - Actors and Actresses

 
 

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SCOTT GLENN

Name: Theodore Scott Glenn                                                                 
Born: 26 January 1941 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania                                             
                                                                                           
Theodore Scott Glenn (born January 26, 1941) is an American actor known for               
appearing in supporting roles. His roles include Wes Hightower in Urban Cowboy (1980),     
astronaut Alan Shepard in The Right Stuff (1983), Commander Bart Mancuso in The           
Hunt for Red October (1990), and as Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).     
                                                                                           
Glenn was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Elizabeth, a homemaker, and                 
Theodore Glenn, a business executive. He grew up in Appalachia and has Irish               
and Native American ancestry. During his childhood he was regularly ill, and               
for a year was bed-ridden. Through intense training programs he got over his               
illnesses, including a limp. After graduating from a Pittsburgh high school,               
Glenn entered College of William and Mary where he majored in English. He then             
joined the Marines for three years and worked roughly five months as a reporter           
for the Kenosha Evening News. He then tried to become an author, but found he             
could not write good dialogue. To learn the art of dialogue, he began taking               
acting classes.                                                                           
                                                                                           
In 1965, Glenn made his Broadway debut in The Impossible Years. He joined George           
Morrison's acting class, helping direct student plays to pay for his studies and           
appearing onstage in La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club productions. In 1967, he           
married Carol Schwartz, his current wife; Glenn converted to his wife's Jewish             
religion upon marrying her. In 1968, he joined The Actors Studio and began                 
working in professional theatre and TV. In 1970, director James Bridges offered           
him his first movie role in The Baby Maker, released the same year.                       
                                                                                           
Glenn that year left for LA and spent about 8 years there acting small roles in           
films and doing brief TV stints, including a TV movie "Gargoyles". He appeared             
in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), in a small role, while there             
and also worked with directors like Jonathan Demme and Robert Altman. Fed up               
with Hollywood, in 1978 Glenn left LA with his family for Ketchum, Idaho and               
worked for the two years he lived there as a barman, huntsman and mountain                 
ranger, occasionally acting in Seattle stage productions.                                 
                                                                                           
In 1980, Glenn got back into acting in films, by appearing as ex-convict Wes               
Hightower in Bridges's Urban Cowboy. After that he appeared in a gothic horror             
film The Keep, action films like Silverado (1985), and The Challenge (1982) and           
drama films like The Right Stuff (1983), TV film Countdown to Looking Glass (1984),       
The River (1984) and Off Limits (1988) as he alternately played good guys and             
bad guys during the 1980s. He returned to Broadway in Burn This in 1987. That             
same year he tried his hand at gangster movies when he starred as the real-life           
sheriff turned gunman Verne Miller in the movie of the same name. "Verne Miller"           
was only given a theatrical release in Finland and went straight to video in the           
U.S. In the beginning of the 1990s his career was at its peak as he appeared in           
several well-known and/or blockbuster films such as The Silence of the Lambs (1991),       
Backdraft (1991), The Hunt for Red October (1990), and The Player (1992). Later           
he gravitated toward more challenging movie roles, such as in the Freudian farce           
Reckless (1995/I), tragicomedy Edie and Pen (1997) and Ken Loach's socio-political         
declaration Carla's Song Today Glenn alternates between mainstream films (Courage         
Under Fire (1996), Absolute Power (1997)), with independent projects (Lesser               
Prophets (1997) and Larga distancia (1998), written by his daughter Dakota Glenn)         
and TV (Naked City: A Killer Christmas (1998)).                                           
                                                                                           
Glenn's most recent theatrical roles were in the drama Freedom Writers, in which           
he played the father of Hilary Swank's character, and in The Bourne Ultimatum.