Scott Glenn


Theodore Scott Glenn is an American actor. His roles have included Wes Hightower in Urban Cowboy, astronaut Alan Shepard in The Right Stuff, Emmett in Silverado, Commander Bart Mancuso in The Hunt for Red October, Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs, John Adcox in Backdraft, Montgomery Wick in Vertical Limit, Roger in Training Day, Ezra Kramer in The Bourne Ultimatum, Kevin Garvey, Sr., in The Leftovers, and as Stick in both Daredevil and The Defenders.

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 programs he recovered from his illnesses, also overcoming a limp.
After graduating from a Pittsburgh high school, Glenn entered The College of William and Mary where he majored in English. He joined the United States Marine Corps for three years, then worked roughly five months as a reporter for the Kenosha Evening News, located 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.
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.

Personal life

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

Career

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 and worked with directors like 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, and action films such as Wild Geese II opposite Laurence Olivier, Silverado, The Challenge and drama films such as The Right Stuff, TV film Countdown to Looking Glass, The River and Off Limits 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, The Silence of the Lambs, Backdraft and The Player. He played a vicious mob hitman in a critically acclaimed performance in Night of the Running Man. Later, he gravitated toward more challenging movie roles, such as in the Freudian farce Reckless, tragicomedy Edie & Pen and Ken Loach's socio-political declaration Carla's Song. In the late 1990s, Glenn alternated between mainstream films, Absolute Power, independent projects and Larga distancia and TV. He was also cast in a supporting role in Training Day. Glenn was cast in the FX drama Sons of Anarchy, 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.

Filmography

Film

Television