Celebrity Almanac Profile: John Glover

John’s middle name is Soursby and he was born on August 7, 1944 in Kingston New York. His first real acting break came in 1972 when Hal Prince cast him as Billy Brown in "The Great God Brown" on Broadway. His most memorable career event was "Love! Valour! Compassion!" and his favorite movie is "Face In The Crowd". Brian Bedford and Lee Remick are his favorite actors and "I Love Lucy" is his all-time favorite TV show. "Buds Won’t Bud" is his favorite tune and he loves baked not fried foods. John indicates that synchronized swimming is his favorite sporting activity and in his spare time he enjoys going to Flea Markets and browsing around. Leonardo Da Vinci is his most admired historical figure and he borrows a line from Shakespeare as his legacy quote: "When ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise".

LOS ANGELES (BPI) -- John Glover is at Towson University in Baltimore teaching in the Theater Arts Department. "I come here every semester," says Glover, a graduate of the university. "I love it because being with the students makes me remember I still do love acting and that the reason I got into acting was for the excitement of theater and the acting itself, not for anything about fame and money."

Glover first acted in high school in Oscar Wilde's comedy of manners "The Importance of Being Earnest," an experience he recalls as "very successful, which made me feel powerful and loved." He went on to practice his craft so successfully he won the ultimate theater accolade, a Tony, for his duel performance as the conflicted twins John and James Jeckyll in the Broadway production of the AIDS-era drama "Love! Valour! Compassion!," and repeated the double duty in the film version. He was also part of the cast of the Emmy-winning l985 TV drama "An Early Frost" about the impact of AIDS on a family whose son is stricken with the horrible condition.

Glover has also been featured in more mainstream entertainment like his two upcoming television appearances on ABC during this November's sweeps. In "Medusa's Child," a four hour mini-series airing Nov l6 and 20 (9-11pm EST), he plays a mad scientist, and in "Dead By Midnight," a two hour movie airing Nov 23 (9-11pm EST), he plays... a mad scientist.

"Well maybe the second scientist isn't quite as mad as the first," laughs Glover who was also the mad scientist in the movie "Batman and Robin," a role he took because it involved being "kissed to death" by Uma Thurman. (The scene "may have flashed by in a moment on the screen," quips Glover, "but took a good longtime to shoot!")

"Do we detect a pattern here?" Glover chuckles about the "mad scientist" tag. "I don't know why I'm good at them. I think we all have madness in us, it's just that I've realized mine and found a way to let it out."

In John J. Nance's thriller-in-the-sky best-seller on which "Medusa's Child" is based, Glover's character, Rogers Henry, kills himself in the novel's opening pages and is heard thereafter only as a computerized, disembodied voice once the terrifying nuclear warhead he has created starts ticking. But in the movie, Henry stays alive much longer. Face-to-face, he menaces his ex-wife, played by Gail O'Grady, and then is seen (gleaming-eyed) as well as heard (angry and taunting) on the video screen attached to the bomb he has managed to trick her into putting aboard a plane.

"It was sort of a no-brainer to cast John," says the miniseries' executive producer Tom Patricia. "He's one of those rare actors -- like James Woods or Donald Sutherland -- who plays great bad guys and, though he must have played hundreds of them, he still manages to find something unique in each and does it without going over the top."

In "Dead By Midnight" Glover plays Drake, one of a pair of scientists who have used a happy family man with a good job as a cybernetic experiment.

Glover took the role because it would allow him to work with director Jim McBride who made "The Big Easy." McBride was someone Glover believed would find an interesting slant to telling the story. "I felt I could do more with the character with Jim's help and, indeed, I feel we spurred each others' ideas."

Other recent Glover projects include a role in Mel Gibson's movie "Payback," in which Glover is a "smarmy slime" of a mid-ranking Mafioso with whom Gibson tangles, and the upcoming whodunnit movie "Dead Broke," in which he finally gets to play a good guy.

"I worry that I'll never work again and I tend the garden of my beautiful home," says Glover, who now lives in Los Angeles. "Putting your hands in the earth is very grounding, if you'll excuse the pun."

LOS ANGELES -- How ugly is the contract killer John Glover plays in the NBC miniseries ``Grass Roots?'' So ugly that when the actor sent a New York friend a snapshot of himself in full makeup with a note apologizing for having to cancel their theater date, she took one look at it and tore it up.

``The note said, `Our date's off, but here's how I'm looking these days,'' recalls Glover with a chuckle. ``She took one look at the picture, freaked out, ripped it up and threw the note in the trash. I never heard from her. When I finally called her up, she told me it was something about the eyes that had frightened her.''

Glover, on the other hand, said he got a kick out of staring at himself in the mirror.

Glover, who was born in Kingston, N.Y., but grew up in Salisbury, Md.,doesn't always play characters on the wrong side of the law. He most recently appeared in ``Drug Wars: The Cocaine Cartel,'' as Loco Garrison, a good ol' boy who works undercover for the FBI as a pilot to combat Colombian druglords. Since leaving the New York theater five years ago, he has also played a variety of characters in such movies as ``Rocket Gibraltar,'' ``Gremlins 2,'' ``The Chocolate War,'' ``Scrooged'' and ``Robocop 2.''

``Because he's identified, the organization sends him to a plastic surgeon to have his appearance changed and he becomes an incredibly handsome man -- me,'' says Glover. ``He was always tormented by his peers growing up because of the way he looked and that caused him a lot of pain. Then he had that ugliness taken away from him and he flips out, and ends up destroying himself.''

MOVIE VILLAINS: ''The industry has such a tendency to type us. I consider myself a very versatile actor. I guess I have excelled at the villains I play, so I understand why they cast me as that. But it's not the most soul fulfilling experience, even though it's usually a lot of fun. I guess it started with John Frankenheimer's movie of Elmore Leonard's `52 Pickup' in 1986. Villains are usually neurotic or psychotic people so they have a lot of nooks and crannies in their personality. Plus they drive the action.''