Scott Glenn

Theodore Scott Glenn was born on January 26, between 1939 and 1941, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is of Irish and Native American ancestry. During childhood he suffered recurring illnesses, including a year spent bedridden with scarlet fever. He recovered through disciplined training in boxing, wrestling, and tang soo do, though he walked with a limp for several years afterward. After graduating from a Pittsburgh high school, he enrolled at the College of William & Mary, where he studied English and earned his degree in 1961. The following year he joined the United States Marine Corps Reserve as an artilleryman, serving for three years. In 1963 he spent roughly seven months as a news and sports reporter for the Kenosha News in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Attempting to become a writer, he found he could not produce dialogue that satisfied readers, and it was that frustration that led him to take acting classes under William Hickey.

Glenn made his Broadway debut in The Impossible Years in 1965. Around that time he joined George Morrison's acting class, helping direct student productions to fund his studies and performing in La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club productions. In 1968 he joined The Actors Studio and began pursuing professional work in theatre and television. Two early television roles came in the 1966 crime series Hawk, starring Burt Reynolds, where Glenn played Hal Currin, and on the CBS daytime serial The Edge of Night as Calvin Brenner. That same year, 1968, he married Carol Schwartz and converted from Catholicism to Judaism. The couple have two daughters, one of whom, Dakota Glenn, later wrote the screenplay for the 1998 film Larga distancia. In 1970, director James Bridges gave Glenn his first film role in The Baby Maker.

Glenn spent eight years in Los Angeles taking small film and television parts, including the TV movie Gargoyles. In 1978 he relocated with his family to Ketchum, Idaho, where he worked as a barman, huntsman, and mountain ranger while occasionally performing in stage productions in Seattle. He appeared in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now in 1979 and collaborated with directors including Jonathan Demme and Robert Altman. In 1980 Bridges cast him again, this time as ex-convict Wes Hightower in Urban Cowboy. Throughout the early 1980s Glenn moved between action and drama, appearing in The Challenge (1982), the World War II horror film The Keep (1983), Wild Geese II (1985) opposite Laurence Olivier, and Silverado (1985). He also portrayed astronaut Alan Shepard in The Right Stuff (1983) and appeared in the television film Countdown to Looking Glass (1984) and the drama The River (1984). In 1987 he starred as real-life sheriff-turned-gunman Verne Miller in Gangland: The Verne Miller Story, which received a theatrical release only in Finland and went directly to home video in the United States. That same year he returned to Broadway in Burn This.

The early 1990s brought some of Glenn's most prominent film work. He played Captain Bart Mancuso in The Hunt for Red October (1990), FBI agent Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), John Adcox in Backdraft (1991), and appeared in The Player (1992). He took on a mob hitman role in Night of the Running Man (1995) and pursued more varied projects in the mid-to-late 1990s, including the Freudian farce Reckless (1995), the tragicomedy Edie & Pen (1997), Ken Loach's Carla's Song, and the mainstream films Courage Under Fire (1996) and Absolute Power (1997), in which he played Bill Burton. Independent productions during that period included Lesser Prophets (1997) and Larga distancia (1998). He appeared in a supporting role in Training Day (2001) as Roger and later played CIA Director Ezra Kramer in both The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and The Bourne Legacy. He portrayed Chris Chenery in Secretariat (2010) and appeared in Sucker Punch (2011). In 2020 he played the grandfather in the apocalyptic thriller Greenland, opposite Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin.

On television, Glenn played Kevin Garvey Sr. throughout the run of HBO's The Leftovers from 2014 to 2017. He portrayed the character Stick in the Marvel Cinematic Universe series Daredevil from 2015 to 2016 and reprised the role in The Defenders in 2017. He joined the cast of the third season of HBO's The White Lotus in 2024, playing Jim Hollinger, co-owner of the Thailand resort at the center of the series, a role for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. In September 2025, the Oldenburg International Film Festival honored Glenn with a career retrospective, opening with the world premiere of Eugene the Marine, directed by Hank Bedford, in which Glenn stars as Eugene Lee Grady, a former marine contending with family pressure and a series of murders targeting those around him.