Veteran character actor Robert Englund was born in Glendale, California, to Janis (MacDonald) and John Kent Englund, an aeronautics engineer. He has Swedish, Danish, Scottish, and English ancestry.
Since 1973, Englund has appeared in over 75 feature films and starred in four TV series. He has starred alongside Oscar-winners Henry Fonda, Susan Sarandon and Jeff Bridges. Since 1984 he's achieved international fame as the iconic boogeyman Freddy Krueger in the hit franchise A Nightmare on Elm Street and its seven sequels. Englund has guest starred in hundreds of hours of TV most recently Bones, Criminal Minds and Hawaii 5-0. He will soon be seen starring in the horror film Fear Clinic, and the English thriller The Last Showing, he can be heard as the voice of the Evil Beaver in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon show. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Robert Englund
Spouse
Nancy Booth (1 October 1988 - present)
Elizabeth Gardner (15 September 1968 - 2 January 1986) (divorced)
Trivia
Attended UCLA (for three classes) and The Academy of Dramatic Art (in Rochester, MI). Other Academy of Dramatic Art graduates include Curtis Armstrong and Richard Riehle.
Parents: Kent and Janis (nee McDonald) Englund.
Member of Actors' Equity Association (1968-), Screen Actors Guild (1973-), American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, Directors Guild of America. Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
One-time TV/radio host.
Married twice, the first occurred during his college heyday. He met his second wife Nancy Booth while working on his feature directorial debut 976-EVIL.
Ranked the #40 top villain for the American Film Institution's Top 100 list of 100 Heroes and Villains for his role as Freddy Krueger.
He has Swedish and Danish ancestry on his father's side, and Scottish ancestry on his mother's side.
Robert is an honors graduate from the Academy of Dramatic Art at Oakland University in Rochester, MI. Prior to that he attended Cal State University, Northridge and UCLA.
Is an avid El rey de la colina (1997) fan.
Cannot, despite popular belief, speak Swedish fluently.
His performance as Freddy Krueger in Pesadilla en Elm Street (1984) is ranked #51 on Premiere Magazine's 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time.
He is a keen surfer, and has been shown on Entertainment Tonight (1981) talking about surfing.
Shares graduation from Granada Hills High School with actor Ossie Beck and John Elway
Wrote an unused treatment for Pesadilla en Elm Street 3: Los guerreros del sueño (1987).
Father helped design the U-2 spy plane.
In 1973 he returned to the Academy of Dramatic Art to teach a stunts and stage fight class while appearing at the nearby regional professional Meadow Brook Theatre.
While a student at the Academy of Dramatic Art he spent a summer teaching at Cranbrook Theatre School in Bloomfield Hills.
Lives in Laguna Beach, California.
An only child.
Personal Quotes
When I was 9, I went to a birthday party. We were supposed to see a cowboy movie, but the programming got screwed up and we saw La mala semilla (1956) instead. Horrifying. For years I was frightened of girls with pigtails.
I saw an entire magazine of Freddy Krueger tattoos. Hey, I'm a classically trained actor who was doing [Anton Chekhov], and now there are thousands of people walking around America with my tattoo on them. I just take it as pop culture.
I get a lot of teenagers going, 'Yo, Krueger,' and honking their horn and giving me the claw. Yeah, I'm recognized.
Gosh, I'd like to direct Our Town on stage.
But it's mostly about pacing yourself when you do these movies.
And in Freddy vs. Jason I like when Jason and I double team Destiny's Child.
You're going to have to surrender a little bit to the contrivance of how Freddy and Jason get together.
I think superheroes today are like whistle blowers.
The last time we had Freddy in reality was part two and Freddy sort of went out on his own.
Most of my nightmares involve me forgetting my lines in a stage play.
Many great horror stories are period pieces and English actors have a facility for historic characters.
Kids today don't watch a black and white movie.
Jeff Bridges taught me a lot about how to keep a scene fresh.
I wouldn't want the pressure of a Six Feet Under or the pressure of improvising like Curb Your Enthusiasm.
I would like to see the technology used to explore more period horror genre works, for example, E. A. Poe.
I have an Italian comedy at the Venice Film Festival.
I always serve the writer first because I'm English trained, even though I'm American.
I always get inspiration from whatever characters say about my character.
If they do something like that, maybe a Freddy Krueger fan, a girl, a really sick goth girl starts killing kids herself and Freddy has to put a stop to it, or they have to fight it out.
I'm basically a movie actor now, and my big roles are mostly horror movies - unless I'm doing a guest star or something - and occasionally I try to get back into television.
I have friends that are much better actors than I am that had to quit the business because they couldn't survive the auditions or the rejections, or people just didn't realize how good they were.
The modern horror audience is wise to our tricks this lets it in on the gag.
[observation, 2014] I'm on my third generation of fans. It's not strange at all for me to go someplace and have a father come up with his sons that he watched ['A Nightmare on Elm Street'] with when they were 12, and invited some friends for a sleepover.
[on his wide-ranging career, including Shakespeare] I had a nude scene with Susan Sarandon, for God's sake. I've done fight scenes with Kris Kristofferson and Richard Gere. I was in all sorts of places in the 1970s. I shot Burt Reynolds point-blank, so I have been around the block.
Freddy Krueger is a great politically incorrect villain, the logo character of a franchise spawned by a low-budget movie, made by some reasonably artistic people who came up with a gimmick. And it is a great gimmick - the idea that a bogey man, a revenge-motif serial killer could manifest himself in the subconscious of the children of the people that did him wrong. Freddy likes it, he is having fun doing it. He is unapologetic about that. You have a punk-rock nihilistic villain.
(Gifs and photos: source_Tumblr and google) birthdays
