Englund was born on June 6, 1947, in Glendale, California, 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 part Scottish. Englund began studying acting at the age of twelve, accompanying a friend to 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 UCLA for three years, before dropping out and 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. Englund had five successful years performing in regional theater including plays by Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. He married for the first time in 1968 to the nurse Elizabeth Gardner, whom he divorced in 1972. Shortly afterward, he returned to the West Coast in search of film work, and landed a supporting role in the film Buster and Billie, directed by Daniel Petrie.\n', '

Englund was briefly considered for the part of Han Solo in the 1977 film Star Wars and, apocryphally, told his close friend Mark Hamill, who was sleeping on his couch, to go audition for the role of young Luke Skywalker, for which Hamill ultimately was cast. Englund wound up in the 1977 film Eaten Alive directed by Tobe Hooper. He then played 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. In his early film roles Englund was usually typecast as a nerd or a redneck, and he first gained attention in the role of Visitor technician and resistance fighter Willie 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.\n', '

But after such typecasting, Englund went against type when he accepted the role of Freddy Krueger, the psychotic burn victim and child murderer in Wes Craven\'s hugely successful A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984. This role catapulted him to fame, and Englund became the first new horror movie star since Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in the 1960s.[citation needed]\n', '

Return to Robert Englund Autograph Profile