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Danny Glover credits his parents’ political views for shaping his outlook on life as he recounts his 30 years in the movie business

THE PERSONAL AND the political are ever-entwined in the life of Danny Glover, best known for starring as an easygoing cop in Lethal Weapon (1987) and its three sequels and as a violent, abusive husband in The Colour Purple (1985).

Off-screen the 65-year-old actor is an outspoken human-rights activist, having focused in recent years on issues of poverty and disease in developing nations in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America.

That Glover has ended up being a movie star is a strange twist of fate. He certainly doesn’t have show-business roots: His great-grandmother was born a slave. His grandmother picked cotton in rural Georgia. His parents were employees of the U.S. Postal Service.

Glover himself began his career working in the mayor’s office in San Francisco, but he had already been bitten by the theatre bug while appearing in a college play, and was thinking about becoming an actor.

“Everything that happens in my life is connected with what people have done before me,” Glover says. “So perhaps, in some kinetic way, I’m talking to you right this moment because my mother didn’t have to pick cotton in September. In September she went to school.”

IN TOUCH

The theme of interconnection has been on Glover’s mind since he was cast as Professor Arthur Teller on the new television series Touch. The science-fiction drama centres on a widowed father (Kiefer Sutherland) who is desperate to find a way to connect with his mute, numbers-obsessed 11-year-old, Jake (David Mazouz). It is Teller, a maverick child psychologist, who realises that the boy has been misdiagnosed as autistic. Instead Jake has special powers that enable him to see the past, present and future by perceiving the patterns that connect apparently unrelated people and events around the world.

Sutherland’s character struggles to reach Jake, not only out of paternal love but also in order to decipher what the boy sees and use it to help people avoid disaster.

“My character is on the cutting edge in his thinking,’’ Glover says, “and in a great deal of my own life I’ve found myself on the cutting edge in thinking, sometimes politically. Deep in my heart I love humanity. That’s beautiful, but there are times when it gets me in trouble.”

That it does. The actor’s activism, chiefly in support of workers’ rights, has occasionally resulted in his arrest. In 2010, for example, he was arrested for trespassing during a Maryland labour-union rally protesting what employees said was unfair and illegal treatment by the food-service company Sodexo.

It wasn’t that or any of his previous arrests that got Glover into trouble with his grandmother, however. Rather it was his performance as a villainous wife beater in Steven Spielberg’s The Colour Purple.

“My grandmother wanted to get a switch after me and spank me when she saw that movie,” the six-foot-three-inch Glover recalls, laughing. “She said she thought I was raised better than to act like that! Something got turned on in her emotionally: ‘As strong and as powerful as he is, I’ll show that boy who’s boss!’”

FAMILY TIES

Born in San Francisco as the eldest of five children, Glover spent two of his first three years on his grandparents’ farm in tiny Lewisville, Georgia, southwest of Augusta.

“I never knew why the connection I felt to my grandmother and grandfather was so strong,” he says, “until I was told that I lived with them.”

If his determination is a legacy from his grandmother and great-grandmother, Glover’s activism is a gift from his parents, both of whom were deeply involved with the postal workers’ union. His mother also rose to be a regional president of the National Council of Negro Women.

“I grew up in a union household,” the actor says. “Even the activities we did as a family were around union affairs. My father was a prince to me. My mother was a force of nature.

“All the brutal things my parents experienced when they were growing up, discrimination and segregation, were not part of my maturation,” Glover says. “But, (because) I live in a society where being black matters in everything that happens, of course it has an effect on me and my career.”

That’s why he has used his own production company, Louverture Films, as a vehicle to make movies intended to, as he has put it, “remind people of our connection to other human beings.” These movies include the documentaries Trouble the Water (2008), about the devastation wreaked on the majority-black areas of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and The Black Power Mixtape 1967-75 (2011).

It was his social activism that led Glover to acting, through his work as a member of the Black Student Union at San Francisco State College.

“(Writer and political activist) Amiri Baraka – LeRoi Jones – came to us in the spring of 1967 to develop a communications program of the arts,” Glover recalls. “He was a leading proponent of black art, and his presence was a magnet that brought people together. As a member of the Black Student Union, I did my first play. I never thought it would develop into anything more.”

STARTING OUT

Graduating with a bachelor’s degree in economics, Glover took a job with San Francisco’s model-cities program. He couldn’t get his mind off that first foray into acting, however, and soon joined an improvisation group “to relax.”

Relaxing it wasn’t. Participating in a play reading, Glover was spotted by the director of the American Conservatory Theatre and asked to join its Black Actors Workshop. For two years he attended classes while still working full time at his government job. Eventually he decided that he couldn’t manage both, however, and left his city job after six years for the uncertain life of an actor.

He was 30, and possessed by “a feeling that this was the next step in my life, my destiny.”

Initially destiny brought him only small film and television roles. He made it to Broadway in Athol Fugard’s Master Harold ... and the Boys (1982), however, in which he was noticed by Robert Benton. The veteran film director was impressed enough to cast Glover in his first leading screen role, co-starring with Sally Field in the farm drama Places in the Heart (1984).

He went on to a wide range of film and television roles, the most notable of which was his onscreen partnership with Mel Gibson as freewheeling cops in four lucrative Lethal Weapon films. Gibson has been controversial in recent years on a number of fronts, ranging from alleged anti-Semitism to charges of domestic abuse, but Glover is supportive of his co-star and off-screen friend, with whom he also appeared in Maverick (1994).

“I don’t pay attention to that stuff,” Glover says. “I just saw Mel. I worked with the man for over 12 years on five films. I know who he is, and I love him.”

Glover lives nine blocks from where he grew up, in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, with his wife, Eliane, a Brazilian professor of education. He has a daughter, Mandisa, by his first marriage, which ended in divorce, and an eight-year-old grandson, as well as two stepsons via his current marriage.

GETTING TOO OLD FOR THIS…?

At 65, the actor is proud to volunteer that he doesn’t drink, smoke or use “any kind of drugs,” and that his blood pressure is a healthy “115 over 70-something.”

More significant, after having suffered from epilepsy for 21 years in his youth, he has been seizure-free for the past three decades without recourse to any medication.

The turning point came 35 years ago, while Glover was performing in Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1972) alongside his close friend, Carl Lumbly. Waiting in the wings to go on, he felt signs of an imminent seizure.

“I kept saying to myself, ‘I will not have this seizure, I will not have this seizure,’” he recalls. “And, when I went onstage, I didn’t have it. But, the moment I got off, I said, ‘Carl, grab me! I’m about ready to have a seizure.’”

He did have that seizure, but it was one of his last. For years Glover didn’t know why they had trailed off, but 10 years ago a physician told him that tests suggested that he had suffered from a herpes virus in his brain, which might have caused his epilepsy.

“The doctor said I had it from the age of 15 to 36,” he says, “and that’s the exact period of time when I went through epilepsy.”

For some, overcoming epilepsy would be a major triumph, but Glover counts his real victories as having come on the domestic front.

“The roughest times are always...being a father, marriage,” he says. “It’s about relationships, being able to communicate and feel comfortable and validated in a relationship while validating the other person.

“I have the most wonderful, wonderful, wonderful wife,” Glover says ebulliently. “We’ve been married for 26 months. She changed my life.”