Glenville was nominated for a Best Director Oscar and a Golden Globe for the 1964 film adaptation of the Jean Anouilh play Becket.
Between 1934 and 1947, he appeared in various leading roles "ranging from Tony Pirelli in Edgar Wallace's gangster drama On the Spot and Stephen Cass in Mary Hayley Bell's horror thriller Duet for Two Hands to Romeo, Prince Hal and an intense Hamlet in a production which he also directed for the Old Vic company in Liverpool..."[4] Glenville's directorial debut on Broadway was Terence Rattigan's The Browning Version in 1949, which starred Maurice Evans.
[6][7] Other notable productions which followed included The Innocents (1950), the stage adaptation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw; Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which starred Douglass Watson and Jack Hawkins, and marked the Broadway debut of Olivia de Havilland (1951);[8] Rattigan's Separate Tables (1954), and Georges Feydeau's Hotel Paradiso (1957).
[citation needed] From that period, he directed the musical Take Me Along (1959–60), based on Eugene O'Neill's play Ah, Wilderness!, with Jackie Gleason, Walter Pidgeon, Robert Morse, Una Merkel and Eileen Herlie.
[citation needed] Critic Howard Taubman, in his book The Making of the American Theatre, supports this story, as does a biographer of Laurence Olivier.
He also directed Edward Albee's adaptation of Giles Cooper's play Everything in the Garden (1967); John Osborne's A Patriot for Me (1969) with Maximilian Schell, Salome Jens and Tommy Lee Jones in his Broadway debut; and Tennessee Williams' Out Cry (1973).
[17] He directed the films Me and the Colonel (1958) with Danny Kaye, Summer and Smoke (1961) with Geraldine Page and Laurence Harvey, Term of Trial (1962) with Laurence Olivier, Simone Signoret and Sarah Miles; Becket (1964) with Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole; Hotel Paradiso (1966)[10] with Guinness and Gina Lollobrigida; and The Comedians (1967) with Elizabeth Taylor, Burton, Guinness, and Peter Ustinov.
[19] In 1971 he began work on the film project of Man of La Mancha, but when he failed to agree with United Artists on the production, he bowed out.
[5]Glenville said that he had retired from directing due to a perceived left-wing turn in art and culture, as well as an embrace of Method acting techniques.