Robert Englund

Robert Barton Englund (born June 6, 1947) is an American actor, voice-actor, singer, and director, best known for playing the fictional serial killer Freddy Krueger, in the Nightmare on Elm Street film series. He received a Saturn Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors in 1987 and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master in 1988. Englund is a classically trained actor. --- Englund was born in Glendale, California on June 6, 1947, the son of Janis (née MacDonald) and John Kent Englund, an aeronautics engineer who helped develop the Lockheed U-2 airplane. He is of part Swedish ancestry, and can speak Swedish fairly well. Englund began studying acting at the age of twelve in a children's theater program at California State University, Northridge. While he was in high school, he attended the Cranbrook Theatre School (organized by the Cranbrook Educational Community) in Bloomfield Hills. He then attended California State University for three years before transferring to Michigan's Oakland University, where he trained at the Meadow Brook Theater, at the time a branch of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Wanting a feature film debut, Englund was briefly considered for the part of Han Solo in the 1977 film Star Wars while visiting his close friend, Mark Hamill, who would later be cast in the film as Luke Skywalker, for which role Englund actually auditioned. Englund's first film wound up being Eaten Alive. He then acted out Ranger in Galaxy of Terror, produced by Roger Corman, which was released in 1981. Since then, Englund has made over 100 appearances on film and television. His early film roles usually typed him as a nerd or a redneck, and he first gained attention in the role of Willie, the lovably innocent alien in the 1983 miniseries V, as well as the 1984 sequel V: The Final Battle, and V: The Series, in which he was a regular cast member. But after such typecasting, Englund acted out a role jarringly against type: the psychotic burn victim and child murderer Freddy Krueger in Wes Craven's 1984 hugely successful A Nightmare on Elm Street. This role catapulted him to nationally syndicated fame, and Englund became the first new horror movie star since Sir Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in the 1960s. His association with the genre led him to top-billed roles in The Phantom of the Opera (1989), The Mangler (1995), and 2001 Maniacs (2005).