We're sitting in the New Haven studio apartment John Glover is using while he acts at the Yale Repertory Theatre, first in Odon von Horvath's Tales from the Vienna Woods, and then in the Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill classic Mahagonny. The window is open to the clear, New England October air, and the long, low table between us is laden with an array of cookies and soft drinks, courtesy of his Vienna Woods co-star Carol Kane. Glover, who will shortly be seen with Roy Scheider in The Last Embrace and with Jeff Bridges in The Ringer, mops up the liquid an over-fizzy bottle of ginger ale has spilled on his sweater, as he says excitedly, "Just before you got here, I sang for the first time in front of my peers. I must have done all right because I could see the people looking at me, and they weren't giggling and they weren't laughing." A frown creases his high forehead. "My god," he says plaintively, "I don't know if I'm a tenor or a baritone! "

The tall, slender young actor was born in upstate New York, "but they moved me away when I was very little. Because my Dad had a knee injury, during the war he worked in gunpowder plants and got moved around a lot. So, soon after I was born they moved into another powder plant." Appropriately, for one with such beginnings, Glover was dynamite in a small role in Julia, as a character who, along with Meryl Streep, taunts Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda about their relationship to each other. What an impact that brief scene had. It is comparatively easy for an actor to rivet an audience in an important role, but how very good an actor must be to make an unimportant role important.

"Mr. Zinnemann, the director," he says gratefully, "was so influential in that. From the first time I met him in New York when he was casting that part, he threw wonderful seeds out to me about Sammy being a tragic character. He would never let me comment on the man. He always made me grow him from those seeds. Which is what good acting has to be. Only one scene," he bemoans, "stayed in the movie, but there were actually two. They had to cut out a lot of flashbacks to preserve the movie's continuity."

Movie audiences had the chance to see him again with Farrah Fawcett-Majors in what might well be called the title role: the "somebody" in Somebody Killed Her Husband. "I played," he explains, "the killer who shows up at the end. A very lovable little killer who enjoys his work so much and just has a great time."

In Jonathan Demme's The Last Embrace, "Roy Scheider meets Janet Margolin, and they have a hate relationship which turns to a passion–a hate-passion love–and I play Janet Margolin's boyfriend, a professor of divinity from Yale, who is a bit of a red herring, and who is very threatened by the attention Janet is giving Roy. Anyway, I've yet to find in a movie a role that weaves right through the whole thing. In The Ringer, I play a guy who works along with Jeff Bridges, and it's a comedy. These roles, when read, are kind of pfft roles, but I'm hoping they'll take off a little like the one in Julia did."

John Glover, who graduated from small to major theater roles, feels, in a very positive way, that he's starting all over again in films, and that his small roles in movies are another necessary and fascinating period of new growth in a different medium. After all, when he was a little child and wanted to be an actor, "it wasn't really an actor, it was a movie star I dreamed of being." But after the last three movies, which were almost back to back, Glover (who won the St. Clair Bayf ield Award when he played Clown in The Winter's Tale at the Stratford American Shakespeare Theatre, and a Drama Desk Award for his acting in the New Phoenix Repertory Company's The Great God Brown) "couldn't wait to do a play again. And now I've had the chance to do two, with wonderful roles and with such a fine director as Keith Hack. Wait till you see me tonight as Alfred in Tales from the Vienna Woods," he says gleefully, but rather indistinctly, his words flavored with chocolate chip cookies. "You won't like me at all tonight. I'm going to play an absolute prick bastard. Well, this guy is really terrific, but he's a bastard.

"I look," he goes on, "for things in the character I'm playing that are similar to my feelings, to how I emotionally attack something. And then I have to look at who I'm dealing with on the stage or in a film, and realize what they are and what they're giving back and forth. Rather than in classes, I learned to act in theaters and then out on the streets by watching people.

"Where I love to act," he continues, "is at the Williamstown Playhouse in Massachusetts, with the crazy Greek, Nikos Psacharopoulos. I get that larger-than-life feel I like so much there. Did you see their Three Sisters with Blythe Danner? Oh, God! Nikos pushed us to do things that actors refused to do. 'No! I can't do that, 'and he insisted, 'Yes, you can. Go ahead. Do it.' And push and push and push. His Chekhov productions are so exciting. They have a special electricity, because he is so very special. It's that Greek kind of sensuality, that passion thing that he brings out in the Russian Chekhov that we're so used to doing languidly," he moves his arms up and down slowly in illustration, "and to which he adds new dimensions because of his Greekness. I spent," he adds nostalgically, "two of the most terrific summers of my life in Williamstown working with Nikos.

"Now, here I am in New Haven doing two wonderful roles. But imagine the fun and challenge of rehearsing the innocent Jimmy Mahoney in Mahagonny in the afternoon and, a few hours later, in the evening, diving, whoosh, into the character of that no-good Alfred in Tales from the Vienna Woods. It's the greatest thing that can happen to an actor." His chiseled face suddenly becomes troubled. "I've just finished being this innocent who comes to the big city and is suckered, and two of his friends are killed, and finally he's executed. They put me in the electric chair and fry me! I just came from rehearsing that. I mean, I'm just back from them strapping me into an electric chair, just before we started talking. I wonder," John Glover adds apprehensively, "whether I've colored this meeting with you from who I just was an hour or so ago."

Who he's just been, or who he is now, or who he's going to be this evening–will the real John Glover please stand up? He's the one who joined Future Teachers of America in high school just because he wanted an F for his sweater and didn't fit into Future Farmers, Nurses, or Homemakers. The one who insists his father's in show business "because he sells televisions now, and he's a real clown. As a salesman, he has that instinct to entertain. An instinct he passed on to me." The one who keeps an apartment in New York, but is never there, because he runs to Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia, or Los Angeles to do a play at the drop of a hat, because he feels it's dangerous to "screw myself to New York."

He's the one who dreams of doing fabulous roles, major or minor, in both theater and movies, "to be able to go back and forth, like an Olivier, and not have to worry about getting old." The one who says that the two mediums are not so very different because "it's all about truth and honesty." And the one who, skipping from theater to film and back again, is enthusiastically embarking on a new and potentially important trip. "Here in New Haven," he says, his voice almost shaking with anticipatory excitement, "they have the Yale Cabaret, which is funny theater. And sometimes they do Pinter plays and Ionesco plays and such, and two students have asked me to direct this piece they want to do. So when Mahagonny opens, I think I'd love to do that."

Add director to the description of the classically handsome, passionately emotional actor who is the real John Glover.

|| home || news || filmography || stage || audio || articles || images || list || forum || fans || Brimstone || Smallville || links || guestbook || about ||