John Glover

John Glover is an American actor born on August 7, 1944, in Kingston, New York, who was raised in Salisbury, Maryland. His father, a television salesman who later developed Alzheimer's disease, influenced Glover's subsequent involvement with the Alzheimer's Association. Glover attended Wicomico High School and pursued acting at Towson University, where he continues to work with theater students annually and in whose name the department awards a scholarship. He launched his professional career at the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia, and later trained under Milton Katselas at the Beverly Hills Playhouse.

Glover's Broadway career spans from 1972 to 2018 and encompasses productions including The Selling of the President, Tartuffe, The Great God Brown, Don Juan, and Blue Holiday. He won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play in 1995 for his dual roles in Love! Valour! Compassion!, a performance he later reprised in the film adaptation. He received a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance in 1973. Additional Broadway work includes appearing as the man in the chair and narrator in The Drowsy Chaperone in 2007, playing Lucky in a Broadway production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot — a role that earned him a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play — and portraying Uncle Ben in the 2012 Broadway production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, directed by Mike Nichols. In 2004, Glover performed in the Philadelphia Theatre Company's staging of Edward Albee's The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, and in 2014 he appeared as Leonato in the Shakespeare in the Park production of Much Ado About Nothing.

On television, Glover's early work included playing a mentally disturbed kidnapper on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow. He appeared in the 1985 television film An Early Frost, the first TV film to address the AIDS crisis, earning an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of a gay AIDS patient. He received a second Emmy nomination in 1994 for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for his appearance on Frasier. His television credits also include a guest role in the Miami Vice episode "Lend Me an Ear" in 1987, two episodes of Murder, She Wrote, the 1986 TV film Apology opposite Lesley Ann Warren, the 1989 miniseries Twist of Fate in which he played Max Brodsky, and HBO's Traveling Man that same year. He portrayed the Devil in the series Brimstone, had a recurring role as Cousin Jerry in The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, played Declan Gage in Law & Order: Criminal Intent, appeared as Henry in ABC's Brothers & Sisters in 2009, and had a brief appearance as Samson Gray in Heroes. Glover is perhaps most widely recognized for his role as Lionel Luthor on Smallville, which he played from 2001 to 2008 across seasons one through seven before returning in the show's tenth and final season in 2010 and 2011 to portray a parallel universe version of the character.

Glover's film work includes a small appearance in Woody Allen's Annie Hall in 1977, a role as a U.S. diplomat in White Nights, Alan Raimy in 52 Pick-Up, Bryce Cummings in Scrooged, Daniel Clamp in Gremlins 2: The New Batch in 1990, a mobster in Payback, and Doctor Jason Woodrue in Batman & Robin. He voiced the Riddler in the DC Animated Universe, including Batman: The Animated Series, and provided voice work for the Tron: Legacy universe, voicing the villain Abraxas in Tron: Evolution and Dyson in Tron: Uprising. In 2013, he starred in the horror anthology Sanitarium, and he guest-starred on The Blacklist in the episode titled "Berlin" in 2014, as well as in an episode of Agent Carter.

Beyond stage and screen, Glover played Telemachus in Yuri Rasovsky's Peabody Award-winning radio dramatization of The Odyssey of Homer and has participated in radio plays produced by LA Theatre Works. In 2011, he narrated the audiobook of Ghost Story, the thirteenth novel in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series, and performed in David Bar Katz's drama The Atmosphere of Memory at the Bank Street Theatre alongside Ellen Burstyn. Glover is gay and married sculptor Adam Kurtzman in 2016; the two had been together since 1993.