Scott Glenn

Early life

Glenn has Irish and Native American ancestry. During his childhood, he was regularly ill, and for a year was bed-ridden, including having scarlet fever. Through intense training in boxing, wrestling and tang soo do, he recovered from his illnesses, although he would limp for a couple of years.

After graduating from a Pittsburgh high school, Glenn entered the College of William & Mary, where he majored in English and graduated in 1961. He joined the United States Marine Corps for three years, then worked for about seven months in 1963 as a news and sports reporter for the Kenosha News, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He tried to become an author, but found he could not write dialogue that satisfied the readers. To learn the art of dialogue, he began taking acting classes taught by William Hickey.

Career

Glenn made his Broadway debut in The Impossible Years in 1965. 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 1968, he joined The Actors Studio and began working in professional theatre and TV. Two of Glenn's early television roles were as Hal Currin in the 1966 crime series Hawk, starring Burt Reynolds, and Calvin Brenner on the CBS daytime serial The Edge of Night. In 1970, director James Bridges offered him his first movie role, in The Baby Maker, released the same year.

Glenn spent eight years in Los Angeles, California, acting in small roles in films and doing TV stints, including a TV movie Gargoyles. In 1978, Glenn left Los Angeles with his family for Ketchum, Idaho, and worked as a barman, huntsman, and mountain ranger, occasionally acting in Seattle stage productions. He appeared in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) and worked with directors such as Jonathan Demme and Robert Altman.

In 1980, he appeared as ex-convict Wes Hightower in Bridges' Urban Cowboy. After that, he starred in the World War II horror film, The Keep (1983), and action films such as Wild Geese II (1985) opposite Laurence Olivier, Silverado (1985), and The Challenge (1982), and drama films such as 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 Gangland: The Verne Miller Story, which was given a theatrical release only in Finland and went straight to video in the U.S.

In the beginning of the 1990s, Glenn's career was at its peak as he appeared in several well-known films, such as The Hunt for Red October (1990), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Backdraft (1991), and The Player (1992). He played a vicious mob hitman in a critically acclaimed performance in Night of the Running Man (1995). Later, he gravitated toward more challenging movie roles, such as in the Freudian farce Reckless (1995), tragicomedy Edie & Pen (1997), and Ken Loach's sociopolitical declaration Carla's Song. In the late 1990s, Glenn alternated between mainstream films (Courage Under Fire (1996), Absolute Power (1997)), independent projects (Lesser Prophets (1997) and Larga distancia (1998), written by his daughter Dakota Glenn) and TV (Naked City: A Killer Christmas (1998)). He was also cast in a supporting role in Training Day (2001). Glenn was cast in the FX drama Sons of Anarchy (2008), as Clay Morrow, but he was replaced after an early pilot episode by Ron Perlman. He portrayed Eugene van Wingerdt in a leading role in the thriller film The Barber. Glenn acted in the 2011 film Sucker Punch as Wise Man.

Glenn appeared in the drama Freedom Writers, in which he played the father of Hilary Swank's character, and in The Bourne Ultimatum and The Bourne Legacy as CIA Director Ezra Kramer. He played the character Stick in Netflix's television series Daredevil and returned to the character in The Defenders series a year later. In 2020, he played the grandfather in Greenland, opposite Gerard Butler & Morena Baccarin—an apocalyptic thriller about a comet destroying most of Earth. In 2024, he joined the cast of season 3 of the HBO series The White Lotus as Jim Hollinger, co-owner of the Thailand White Lotus resort.

In September 2025, Oldenburg International Film Festival paid tribute to Glenn with a retrospective of his career. The festival opened with the world premiere of Eugene the Marine, a film directed by Hank Bedford. The movie stars Glenn in the lead role of Eugene Lee Grady, a former marine struggling to keep his life together as his son is trying to force him out of his longtime home as a series of murders occur targeting the people around him.

Personal life

He wed Carol Schwartz in 1968 and upon their marriage, Glenn converted to Judaism, his wife's faith, from Catholicism. They have two daughters.

Filmography

Film

Television

References

Notes

References

1. (January 30, 2016). "Scott Glenn is a 75-Year-Old Knife-Fighting, Spear-Fishing Madman".
2. (29 August 2017). "Scott Glenn Abandoned Hollywood in His 30s. That's when His Career Took off".
3. (August 16, 2017). "Scott Glenn, Wielding Knives on a Screen Near You". [[The New York Times]].
4. Roxborough, Scott. (September 10, 2025). "Scott Glenn on Gene Hackman, Saving Coppola’s Life and Still Having “Gas Left in the Tank”". Hollywood Reporter.
5. Otterson, Joe. (August 18, 2025). "‘White Lotus’ Star Scott Glenn Found a Kindred Spirit in Mike White: ‘Let’s Be Unpredictable Together’". Variety.
6. https://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/2025/01/26/Famous-birthdays-for-Jan-26-Andrew-Ridgeley-Joseph-Quinn/3271737846956/
7. Earl, William. (October 23, 2024). "85-Year-Old Scott Glenn Stars in Bloody Action Thriller 'Eugene the Marine,' More Than 60 Years After Enlisting in Real Life (EXCLUSIVE)".
8. Archerd, Army. (2002-03-05). "Friedkin wraps difficult 'Hunted' shoot".
9. "Welcome".
10. "Theatre Alumni".
11. Kolson, Ann. (November 17, 1983). "Glenn Practices Hard to Make Roles Authentic". [[Ottawa Citizen]].
12. Garfield, David. (1980). "A Player's Place: The Story of The Actors Studio". MacMillan Publishing.
13. Carpenter, Susan. (October 26, 2006). "Think Hamlet on Harleys". [[Los Angeles Times]].
14. (2 March 2015). "'The Barber' Trailer Takes a Little Off the Top".
15. Perry, Spencer. (November 2, 2016). "Scott Glenn, Rachael Taylor, and Rosario Dawson Confirmed for The Defenders".
16. Roxborough, Scott. (2025-08-21). "'Eugene the Marine' With Scott Glenn to Open Oldenburg Film Festival".
17. "Scott Glenn Is Spaced Out, Wife Carol's Gone to Pot, but Both of Them Have the Right Stuff".
18. Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub. (2009-06-24). "Zack Snyder talks WATCHMEN Director's Cut Blu-ray, Comic-Con 2009, 300 Blu-ray, and SUCKER PUNCH".
19. Fleming, Mike Jr.. (January 5, 2023). "Briarcliff Entertainment Acquires Dennis Quaid-Led Sports Drama 'The Hill;' Sets Wide Domestic Theatrical Release August 18".