Victor Glynn, an award winning film and television producer and writer, was born in Balham, London on 11 October 1956. He married Lorna Gillian (Gill) Glynn (née Hastilow) in 1982. She died in 1999. He has four children. His daughter Harriet is a film producer. He was a second cousin of the comedian and actor Dick Emery.
After working for the BBC World Service for a number of years in the mid to late 1970s he joined Michael Bogdanov at the Young Vic Theatre, London as Press Officer. After working at a wide range of theatres as a publicist, including the Old Vic, Liverpool Playhouse, Oxford Playhouse and in the West End, he co-produced a number of plays at the Edinburgh Fringe and Here's a Funny Thing a play about Max Miller starring John Bardon at the Fortune Theatre in London in January 1982. This production was filmed for Channel Four and broadcast in November 1982. He maintained his involvement in theatre as a Director of the English Shakespeare Company from its inception in 1986 under the joint artistic direction of Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington.
At the age of 25, in 1982, he started producing independent films. Over the next three years he produced many productions for the nascent Channel Four. These included Good and Bad at Games, the first screenplay written by William Boyd, Michael Bogdanov's adaptation of Hiawatha with the National Theatre, and the Jack Gold's feature The Chain which starred Warren Mitchell, Bernard Hill, Nigel Hawthorne, Billie Whitelaw and Leo McKern. For the BBC and Masterpiece Theatre, he was Executive Producer of Noël Coward's Star Quality, a series of six plays which starred, among others, Judi Dench, Ian Holm, Susannah York, Ian Richardson, Patricia Hayes, Max Wall, Gary Waldhorn, Nigel Havers and a very young Hugh Laurie.
From 1984 until 1996 Victor Glynn was with Portman Productions (later) Portman Zenith Group, initially as Head of Production and for the last nine years as Chief Executive.
In 1987, Victor Glynn produced Mike Leigh's film The Short and Curlies and in 1988 co-produced (with Simon Channing-Williams) the multi award-winning Mike Leigh feature High Hopes for Channel Four and Palace Pictures.[1]
In 1988, he brought Rolf Harris over from the BBC to ITV and was instrumental in the setting up of Rolf's Cartoon Club which was to become a huge success and was to run for more than 100 episodes. In the same year he introduced Home & Away to a UK audience on ITV.
During this period the Portman expanded its production base considerably and in 1993 it acquired Zenith Productions from Carlton Communications and Paramount Pictures. Zenith, was probably best known as the producer of Inspector Morse for ITV. Zenith's other productions between 1992 and 1995 included 99:1 starring Leslie Grantham and Finney with David Morrissey and Andy Serkis for ITV, Hamish Macbeth starring Robert Carlyle and Byker Grove (cradle of Ant & Dec) for the BBC, and the feature films Amateur with Isabelle Huppert for Sony Pictures Classics and Deadly Advice starring Jane Horrocks and Jonathan Pryce.
His many productions in this period included Mike Newell's An Awfully Big Adventure based upon Beryl Bainbridge's novel and starring Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman and Prunella Scales; an adaptation of C. P. Taylor's And a Nightingale Sang with Joan Plowright and Stephen Tompkinson and which won the Prix Europa and Malcolm Bradbury's Silver Nymph-winning The Gravy Train and The Gravy Train Goes East with Ian Richardson, Francesca Annis and Oscar winner Christoph Waltz. Other productions included Christopher Hampton's Total Eclipse starring Leonardo di Caprio and David Thewlis, the mini series Friday on my Mind starring Christopher Eccleston for BBC1 and an adaptation of Rosamunde Pilcher's September which featured Jacqueline Bisset, Jenny Agutter, Mariel Hemingway and Paul Guilfoyle.
Between 1996 and 2003 he was President of Golden Square Pictures/ Sony Pictures Television Productions (UK). Productions during this time included Urban Gothic (TV series) and Don't Try This at Home.
Since 2003 he has been credited as a production and script consultant to a number of major production companies and commercial brands. He is also a Fellow of the Oxford Media Group, an Associate Partner at Branded Entertainment in London and in addition to this he is a tutor at Oxford University Department for Continuing Education and lectures on a regular basis at other university creative writing, media and film departments.
In 2009, he was reported (unconfirmed) to be working undercover as an Events Manager at Borders bookshop in Oxford whilst researching a documentary film. The film in turn is suspected to be a cover for an operation conducted by MI5, targeted at the notoriously violent Oxford bookseller mafia.
His book Santa and the Pirates, illustrated by his brother Chris Glynn, is rumoured to be appearing in time for Christmas 2010.
On 4th April 2011 Glynn was seen taking the famous Blackwell's bicycle out of the Oxford store, as he claimed he needed to get to the Oxford Lit Festival as quickly as possible. During this process he nearly fell off.