John Glover

Watch John Glover arrive in a scene and count the seconds before somebody at the table wishes he had not. In Julia (1977) he is Sammy, a drunk who says the thing nobody else will, and he is on screen for barely long enough to do it. It is a small part, and it is the kind of small part that decides an actor's next thirty years. Producers remember the man who made everyone uncomfortable, and they ring him when they need it done again.

They rang often. Glover came to the screen from the stage, the Barter Theatre in Virginia, and moved into television in the early 1970s and into film in 1977 with small roles in Annie Hall and Julia. The 1980s made him a character actor, usually smooth and usually not to be trusted: Alan Raimy in 52 Pick-Up (1986), which he has called one of the favourite roles of his career, and then Daniel Clamp in Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), a comic villain in a studio sequel. From there the comic-book people found him and kept him. Dr Jason Woodrue in Batman & Robin (1997), the voice of the Riddler in DC's animated series, Lionel Luthor in Smallville from 2001 to 2011 and back again after that, Mr Sivana in a comic-book film in 2019. He has kept working on stage throughout, including a double role as the Jeckyll brothers, John and James, on Broadway in 1995, later filmed.

We have reviewed two of these. Batman & Robin we scored 35, and Glover is not among the reasons; our review found the sets inventive and Uma Thurman amusing and did not find room to mention him, which says less about him than about a film that keeps its actors under the costumes. Julia we scored 60 and called respectful, and Sammy is one of the few arrivals in it we were glad of. In a film that keeps everyone at arm's length, here was a man too drunk to keep his distance, and for a minute the film had some air in it.

What he does, when a script allows it, is play the charm and the menace at the same time and let us decide which is the act. That is a stage actor's trick, holding two things in the face at once, and it is why he is so often asked to be eccentric or dangerous or both. He knows the cost. "Because I've played so many roles that are villains, I like to think it's because I do them well that they stand out," he has said, before adding that the film industry types actors more than the stage does, and that actors usually get to play how they are perceived.

Nearly fifty years on, the perception has not shifted, and on the evidence he has done well by it. We would still like to see somebody cast him as the one honest man in a corrupt town, if only to find out whether we could believe him. We suspect we could not, and that he would enjoy that more than anyone.