Article by Margy Rochin August 1988

When family friends back home in Salisbury, Maryland, see New Age villain John Glover slime his way through a movie, his father, Jack, always proffers a disclaimer: "We never let him talk that way around the house...."

Of course, the juicy expletives are a small part of what has won the 43-year old his reputation as Everyone's Favorite Bad Guy. He brought a fun-lovin' lustiness to "Julia", "52 Pick-Up", and "Masquerade" and created his own acting hybrid: picture Peter Lorre's flesh-crawling evil grafted to the bounce and body of Mr. Greenjeans.

His father is unsure how his only son developed such a facility for playing malevolent crackpots: "If I say that John got it from his mother, it's because she's not home right now," he deadpans. Glover says his enthusiasm for the wicked-at-heart dates back to college, when he performed one of Iago's monologues from "Othello". "Something about it made me very, very happy," he recalls. "The root and reason of these people who lash out or behave like vicious pricks is that they are frightened. So these parts have so many more levels."

Glover ventures that his darker side bloomed during adolescence, when he was short, pudgy, and painfully timid. ("When my parents would ask me if I wanted to go to summer camp, I'd say, 'No! No!'") He spent his spare afternoons by himself seeing the same movies two or three times. When the drama teacher at Wicomico High School rejected him for the junior class play, he turned enterprising: he joined the stage crew and captured the audience's attention during set changes. ("The next year, I played the lead.")

After graduation, Glover says, he didn't pursue an acting career because "it seemed a kind of unattainable feat"; instead he attended Baltimore's Towson State Teachers College, hoping to become a drama teacher. Then his mother, Cade, finagled an apprenticeship for her son at the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia. "I was terrified, because I had never been away from home before," he says. "But within two hours of being there, I began to feel this kind of freedom. I was in my element."

Perhaps Glover's uncensored passion is what makes his performances so hard to forget. Even in a 54-second appearance in "Annie Hall" -- as Keaton's gangly, religioso ex-boyfriend who insists that she "touch my heart with your foot" -- he was utterly enthralling. He was so giddily poisonous as the cocktail-swilling stepfather in "Masquerade" that Pauline Kael was moved to knight him "the prime rotter of the eighties."

The twenty-year plus veteran of stage, film and television (he's been twice nominated for Emmys) is as modest as he is bankable. In "Rocket Gibraltar", Glover plays Burt Lancaster's eldest son, a telephone-obsessed movie producer. Last February, he shuttled between Los Angeles and Seattle while working on "Scrooged" and "The Chocolate War" simultaneously. In the former, a big-budget affair starring Bill Murray, he plays a conniving sports producer who is "the movie's Los Angeles joke....I talk a lot about my lacrosse teacher." "The Chocolate War", written and directed by actor Keith Gordon, takes place in a Catholic boys' school in which Glover's character, the manipulative Brother Leon, uses a candy sale to increase his own power base. "It's like 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' meets 'Lord of the Rings'," Glover explains with a laugh, "and I'm Jean Brodie."

Glover makes each part distinctive by undergoing a physical transformation that starts with his hair. He will shave it or grease it or dye it, say, buttercup yellow. He's so skilled at manufacturing these complicated "hair images" that one could see him pioneering a Hollywood extension course. "That's right," says Glover, his hazel eyes widening. "I could call it...'Acting and the Hairdresser'."

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