Theodore Scott Glenn (born January 26, 1941) or (January 26, 1942) is an American actor. His roles have included 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 Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Early life

Glenn was born Theodore Scott Glenn in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Elizabeth, a homemaker, and Theodore Glenn, a business executive. He grew up in Pittsburgh 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 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 then joined the Marine Corps 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; Glenn converted to his wife's Judaism upon their marriage. 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.

Career

Glenn 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 Los Angeles 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' Urban Cowboy. After that he appeared in a gothic horror film The Keep, action films like Wild Geese II (1985) opposite Laurence Olivier, Silverado (1985), 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 a 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). 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/I), tragicomedy Edie and Pen (1997) and Ken Loach's socio-political declaration Carla's Song. In the late '90s 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 the leader of an outlaw biker gang, but he was replaced after an early pilot episode by Ron Perlman.

Glenn appeared in the drama Freedom Writers, in which he played the father of Hilary Swank's character, and in The Bourne Ultimatum.

Filmography

The Baby Maker (1970)

Hex (1973)

Nashville (1975)

Apocalypse Now (1979)

More American Graffiti (1979)

Urban Cowboy (1980)

Personal Best (1982)

The Challenge (1982)

The Right Stuff (1983)

The Keep (1983)

The River (1984)

Countdown to Looking Glass (1984)

Wild Geese II (1985)

Silverado (1985)

As Summers Die (1986)

Man on Fire (1987)

Off Limits (1988)

Miss Firecracker (1989)

The Hunt for Red October (1990)

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys (1991)

Backdraft (1991)

Women & Men 2 (1991)

Shadowhunter (1993)

Extreme Justice (1993)

Past Tense (1994)

Night of the Running Man (1995)

Tall Tale (1995)

Reckless (1995)

Courage Under Fire (1996)

Carla's Song (1996)

Absolute Power (1997)

Firestorm (1998)

Naked City: Justice with a Bullet (1998)

The Virgin Suicides (1999)

Vertical Limit (2000)

Training Day (2001)

Buffalo Soldiers (2001)

The Shipping News (2001)

A Painted House (2003)

Puerto Vallarta Squeeze (2004)

Homeland Security (2004)

Faith of My Fathers (2005)

Code Breakers (2005)

Journey to the End of the Night (2006)

Freedom Writers (2007)

Camille (2007)

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

Nights in Rodanthe (2008)

Surfer, Dude (2008)

W. (2008)

Secretariat (2010)

Sucker Punch (2011)