As a child, Scott Glenn routinely battled illness and was bedridden for a full year with scarlet fever. His long recovery marked the beginning of an intense and lifelong passion for physical fitness and adventurous sports.

Following a stint the military, Glenn worked as a crime reporter for a short time in Kenosha, WI, before being offered a newspaper job in the Virgin Islands. Though he accepted the job offer, Glenn decided to finish a play he had been writing before he began work. Since he was struggling with creating dialogue, a friend suggested that acting classes might help him with the problem. Two weeks in, Glenn realized that he was born to act and he continued studying with renowned actor William Hickey, before training with the legendary Lee Strasberg at the Actor's Studio while working as a laborer and bouncer.

Within a year, he was onstage in off-Broadway productions at La Mama and The Public theaters, and by 1969 he was receiving regular paychecks for a recurring role on the daytime soap "The Edge of Night." In 1970 he was cast in his first feature, playing opposite Barbara Hershey in "The Baby Maker," which led to a decision to move to Los Angeles in pursuit of more film work.

Glenn finally began to break out when director Robert Altman cast him in his landmark film, "Nashville." He was next seen briefly in Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" and "She Came to the Valley." After taking a two-year break from Hollywood in Idaho, Glenn was lured back into showbiz by playing an ex-convict and arch-rival of John Travolta's Bud Davis in the hit "Urban Cowboy." With his career finally kicked into high gear in his early forties, Glenn began to enjoy steady and varied work on the big screen, playing roles in "Personal Best" and "The Right Stuff." (

After starring opposite Sissy Spacek and Mel Gibson in the family drama, "The River," he joined Kevin Kline, Kevin Costner and Danny Glover for Lawrence Kasdan's revisionist Western, "Silverado." Glenn went on to play notorious mob hit man Verne Miller in "Gangland: The Verne Miller Story," before co-starring with Willem Dafoe and Gregory Hines in the action thriller "Off Limits." (1988). Meanwhile, his reputation continued to grow in the following decade with "The Hunt for Red October" the Oscar-winning Best Picture, "The Silence of the Lambs."

Branching out into indie dramas, Glenn had a small role as a priest in Sofia Coppola's film debut "The Virgin Suicides," and went on to further acclaim for his acting in the Mt. Everest action thriller, "Vertical Limit." Slipping comfortably into character parts, Glenn shined as a former cop-turned-drug dealer in "Training Day" and was an eccentric fisherman who owns a local Newfoundland newspaper in "The Shipping News."

He turned to television in the early part of the new century, starring as a cotton farmer in "A Painted House" and an FBI agent brought in to organize the new government bureaucracy of "Homeland Security." He returned to indie filmmaking with a starring turn opposite Brendan Fraser in the crime thriller "Journey to the End of the Night." After supporting Hilary Swank in "Freedom Writers," he was the director of the CIA in "The Bourne Ultimatum" and portrayed U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Oliver Stone's satirical biography, "W." Sticking with real-life personages, Glenn portrayed businessman and thoroughbred horse owner Christopher Chenery in "Secretariat," before being seen as the Wise Man in the action-fantasy "Sucker Punch."

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