Glenn: New York gave him right stuff

Television and film star Scott Glenn never could’ve scripted the way his career turned out.

A veteran of nearly 100 roles spanning more than five decades — including his latest, “Greenland,” Glenn initially dreamed of becoming a poetry writer, and joined the Marines and worked as a newspaper reporter in Kenosha, Wis., before he thought about acting.

Everything changed when Glenn was about 27 and accepted a job that didn’t start for six months with a newspaper in the Virgin Islands. A friend suggested he use the downtime to take acting classes in New York to improve the dialogue in his writing.

He took that advice — and was hooked.

“I stood in front of about 11 people and started to open my mouth and literally, for the first and only time in my life, it was like a light bulb went off between my eyes,” Glenn said.

“It wasn’t like a big epiphany of creative joy and juices or anything like that. It was just that for the first time my life made sense to me. It happened that fast.”

Glenn, 81, has performed in movies such as “Apocalypse Now,” “Urban Cowboy,” “Silverado,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” “The Hunt for Red October” and “The Right Stuff.”

In “Greenland,” he plays a widowed military veteran who remains peaceful as a comet scorches toward Earth.

“To a certain extent, I think every actor probably, whether they intend to or not, uses whatever experiences they’ve had in their lives,” Glenn said of his approach to the film.

Glenn overcame scarlet fever as a child and remembers the medical staff isolating him as he battled the illness.

“They wouldn’t let me read in fear it would (hurt) my eyesight,” Glenn said. “So I lived with my imagination for that period of time.”

Glenn is grateful for his opportunities, as well as for the chance to continue doing what he loves.

“I didn’t plan on being in classic films, great American films, like ‘Nashville’ or ‘Apocalypse Now’ or ‘The Right Stuff.’ All that stuff just wound up sitting on my lap, so in that way I just feel really, really lucky,” he said. “I never stopped writing poetry. That part of my life is still alive and challenging me every day.”