He's played everything from a Yale divinity professor ("Last Embrace") to a psychotic killer ("Somebody Killed Her Husband") but for John Glover, those "blond and weird" roles fit him "like a glove"!

What can you say about an actor who joined the Future Teachers of America in high school just so he could have an "F" on his sweater?

You can say 35-year-old John Glover (he was born on August 7, 1944 in Kingston, New York) had "a normal, neurotic childhood" in Salisbury, Maryland where he grew up and spent Saturday after Saturday indulging starstruck fantasies at a local movie palace. "I was an only child," the classically handsome actor explains.

Even as a youngster, John's goals were quite clearcut--he had to be an actor. After all, he came from a "show business family"--sort of. ("My father is in show business," he laughs, "because he sells televisions and he's a real clown!") Unlike most beginning actors whose I.Q.s rarely exceed their age, Glover came to his calling well-prepared--after graduating from Towson State University in Baltimore, he appeared in a wide variety of roles in bus-and-truck ("more like station wagon and trailer!") productions before slipping into high gear--and higher pay--in much more prestigious acting companies like the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, the Statford American Shakespeare Theatre, and L.A.'s Mark Taper Forum.

If the company Glover kept on stage was impressive, the company he's been keeping in films so far has been equally imposing--and diverse. Critics raved--and audiences were stirred into who-is-that? kind of curiosity--when John played the pathetically obnoxious "Sammy" in Julia as Jane Fonda's slick-and-seedy friend whom she promptly decks when he drunkenly implies her relationship with Vanessa Redgrave might be too friendly. Next, he was the "somebody" in Somebody Killed Her Husband--"the loveable little killer," John grins, "who chases Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Jeff Bridges all through Bloomingdale's basement."

More recently, John has graduated to larger roles in The Last Embrace with Roy Scheider and Janet Margolin. "Actually, in that one," he says, "I'm a bit of a red herring. I play a professor of divinity from Princeton. Now that was a challenge!" Perhaps even more challenging was Ringer (now retitled American Success Story), also starring Jeff Bridges and Bianca Jagger, in which Glover, again, "played a blond creep."

Asked if he's worried about being typecast in such unsavory roles, the easy-going yet somehow intense actor shrugs his shoulders and counters, "No, not really. I mean, look at Richard Widmark. He played wonderful bad people...they were wonderful because he made them human."

Currently before the cameras in Melvin and Howard, Universal's "human comedy" about the headlined comedy-of-errors involving the late Howard Hughes and gas station attendant Melvin Dummar, John not only has the opportunity to play a "lighter" role as one of Hughes' corporation lawyers but also gets to spar (at least on screen) with the likes of Jason Robards, Paul LeMat, and Mary Steenburgen.

Not bad for that little boy from Maryland from whom it once "wasn't really an actor, it was a 'movie star' I dreamed of being.

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