Bruce Glover as Mr. Wint, on left, and Putter Smith as Mr. Kidd, on right, during the filming of James Bond movie, “Diamonds Are Forever,” in 1971. (Rob Mieremet/Netherlands National Archives)
Bruce Glover, a prolific character actor known for playing icy villains and no-nonsense lawmen, including an assassin who goes after Sean Connery in the James Bond movie “Diamonds Are Forever” and a P.I. who works with Jack Nicholson in the neo-noir classic “Chinatown,” died March 12 at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 92. His son, actor and director Crispin Glover, announced the death but did not cite a specific cause.
Glover, a streetwise Chicago native who said he spent years trying to get rid of his “dese, dems and dose” accent, appeared in more than 100 movies and television shows, building his résumé in the 1960s and ’70s with roles on “Perry Mason,” “Adam-12,” “Mod Squad” and “Gunsmoke,” among other westerns and crime dramas.
Although he dabbled in comedy, making a cameo as an eccentric wheelchair-user in Terry Zwigoff’s 2001 film “Ghost World,” he was typically cast as crooks, cops and other assorted tough guys. He played a Tennessee sheriff’s deputy in the hit crime movie “Walking Tall” (1973), reprising the part for two sequels, and was a mob boss trying to recoup a debt from a hustler in the boxing film “Hard Times” (1975), starring Charles Bronson and James Coburn.
In between, he had a small role as Duffy in “Chinatown” (1974), director Roman Polanski’s exploration of greed and corruption in 1930s Los Angeles. His character, a friend and colleague of detective J.J. “Jake” Gittes (Nicholson), is there to comfort Gittes at the end of the movie, joining him on a long walk into the darkness after another associate, played by Joe Mantell, delivers the film’s iconic last line: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
Glover remained best known for his villainous turn in “Diamonds Are Forever” (1971), the sixth Bond film to feature Connery as the suave secret agent. Glover played a deceptively polite henchman, Mr. Wint, who teams up with fellow assassin Mr. Kidd (played by the mustached jazz musician Putter Smith) to protect a smuggling operation run by the cat-loving supervillain Blofeld (Charles Gray).
The film grossed more than $115 million worldwide and, with Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, featured two of the Bond franchise’s more memorable evildoers — gay assassins who pose arm-in-arm, finish each other’s sentences and crack morbid jokes after each kill. Together they knock off a dentist by placing a scorpion down his shirt, drown a schoolteacher in an Amsterdam river and seal 007 in a coffin while attempting to burn him alive in a crematorium.
“Heartwarming,” Mr. Kidd deadpans as the coffin heads toward the furnace, with funeral music playing in the background. “A glowing tribute,” adds Mr. Wint.
When their plan fails, the duo attempt to bury Bond in a pipeline outside Las Vegas. They later try to blow him up by posing as tuxedo-clad servers aboard a cruiseliner, where they serve 007 a bomb disguised as a cake. The plan goes awry when Bond recognizes the smell of Mr. Wint’s aftershave.
Before long, Bond manages to set Mr. Kidd on fire and toss Mr. Wint overboard, pulling the henchman’s arms through his legs, attaching the bomb to his coat and somersaulting Mr. Wint over the ship’s railing. The bomb detonates just as Mr. Wint hits the water, and just before Bond delivers one last zinger: “Well, he certainly left with his tails between his legs.”
Glover liked to improvise, and proudly told Entertainment Weekly in 2021 that he came up with the idea for his character’s death. “This could be a big laugh,” he recalled telling director Guy Hamilton. He added that actor Roger Moore, who succeeded Connery as Bond, “said it’s the funniest Bond moment in all of the films - and I think it is. I’m not very humble about that.”
The oldest of four children, Bruce Herbert Glover was born on May 2, 1932. His father ran a jewelry store downtown, and his mother looked after the home.
Glover grew up in a working-class Chicago neighborhood — “several of my boyhood pals are serving time for manslaughter,” he told an interviewer in 1972 — and traced his interest in acting to a Christmas pageant at his family’s Methodist church, where as a young boy he delivered a single line, “No room at the inn,” in an unexpectedly booming voice.
“The whole church burst into laughter,” he recalled in a 2019 interview for Van Gogh’s Ear, an arts publication.
“And I remember going, ‘Wow I can make people laugh.’ So I said the line again and they laughed more, and I said it again and they laughed more. And then the minister came running up the aisle trying to catch me and I was running around behind the altar and through the section of the church and he’s trying to catch me and I’m yelling out, ‘No room at the inn.’ ”
At age 6, Glover began working to help support the family. He delivered groceries and later sold magazines, dug graves, mowed lawns and worked at a glass factory. He played football at Wright Junior College, now Wilbur Wright College in Chicago, before flunking out; he was later diagnosed as dyslexic.
Glover served in the Army during the Korean War and returned home to study speech at Northwestern University, where he acted in plays and paid his way through college in part by performing at a strip club. He had been recruited, he said, by a dancer he met while posing for art students. The woman wanted him “to wear a hundred-pound ape suit and toss her around for 15 minutes.”
“It was Shakespeare in the day,” he recalled of his college years, “and the ape suit at night at the Mafia-run strip club. Two kinds of education.”
After graduating in 1957, he moved to New York City to launch his acting career. He had small roles in Broadway stagings of Tennessee Williams’s “The Night of the Iguana” and Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children.”
An early marriage to Connie Overstake, in 1949, ended in divorce the next year. In 1960, he married Betty Koerber, an actress and ballet dancer.
Their son, Crispin, went on to appear in movies including “Back to the Future” (1985) and “River’s Edge” (1986), in addition to directing independent films under his full name, Crispin Hellion Glover.
Glover had used Hellion as an adopted middle name when he was a struggling actor, psyching himself up by embracing an identity as a troublemaker. He later acted in some of his son’s films, including the drama “It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine.” (2007), as well as an untitled movie scheduled for release this year.
His wife died in 2016. He was also predeceased by a son, Michael, from his first marriage. In addition to his son Crispin, survivors include a brother.
For years, Glover painted and taught acting when he wasn’t performing on the stage or screen. His approach was instinctual — practical, not theoretical — and honed during his early years performing in summer-stock theater, when he sometimes did a play a week.
“No 12, no 25 steps,” he said of his approach. “Think the thoughts of the character. Have a conversation. That’s how simple it is.”
