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Rod Steiger (April 14, 1925 – July 9, 2002) was an American Academy Award-winning actor best known for his intense performances in such films as In the Heat of the Night, On the Waterfront and Doctor Zhivago.
BiographyEarly lifeHe was born Rodney Stephen Steiger to Lutheran parents in Westhampton, New York. He was of French, Scottish, and German descent[1] (the origin of his surname). He never knew his father, and was raised by his alcoholic mother before running away from home at age sixteen to join the United States Navy during World War II, where he saw combat on destroyers in the Pacific. After the war, he returned to New Jersey and joined a drama group before studying drama full-time under Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan at The Actor's Studio. Career
He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for On the Waterfront (1954), in which he played Marlon Brando's character's brother. The most famous scene in the film is when Brando's Terry Malloy tells his brother that he "coulda been a contender". He was nominated again, this time for Best Actor, for the gritty The Pawnbroker (1965), a Sidney Lumet film in which Steiger portrays an emotionally withdrawn Holocaust survivor living in New York City. He played Jud Fry in the film version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!, in which he did his own singing. One of his favorite roles was as the rapacious aristocrat Komarovsky in Doctor Zhivago (1965). Steiger, the only American in the cast of that film, was initially apprehensive about working with such great British actors as Ralph Richardson and Alec Guinness, and was afraid that he would stick out. However, his fears proved unfounded, as he won much acclaim for his role in this film. He also befriended fellow actor Tom Courtenay on this film; the two remained friends until Steiger's death. [2]
He also played well known figures such as Napoleon Bonaparte in Waterloo (1970); Benito Mussolini in The Last Four Days (1974) and again in Lion in the Desert (1981); W.C. Fields in W.C. Fields and Me (1976); Pontius Pilate in Franco Zeffirelli's TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth (1977); and mob boss Sam Giancana in the TV miniseries Sinatra (1992). He appeared in several Italian films including both Francesco Rosi's Hands Over the City (1963) and Lucky Luciano (1974), and also Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dynamite (1971). In France, he starred in Claude Chabrol's Innocents with Dirty Hands opposite Romy Schneider. Among his best known roles in his later years was as the priest who gets pestered by flies in The Amityville Horror (1979); the Latin American crime lord in The Specialist (1994) opposite Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone; and as an aggressive gung-ho general in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!. On television, he appeared in miniseries Jackie Collins' Hollywood Wives (1985), Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City (1993) and a 1995 Columbo TV movie. Among his final feature film roles was as the judge in the Denzel Washington prison drama The Hurricane (1999). The film reunited him with director Norman Jewison, who directed him in In the Heat of the Night, for which Steiger won his Oscar, and the 1978 Stallone film F.I.S.T. Steiger also appeared in the film version of Kurt Vonnegut's play Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1971). In 1969, he appeared in the film adaptation of Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man with his then-wife Claire Bloom. He was offered the title role in Patton but turned it down because he did not want to glorify war. The role was then given to George C. Scott, who won the Oscar. Steiger called this refusal his "dumbest career move." He also turned down The Godfather. Personal lifeSteiger had five wives, the late actress Sally Gracie (married 1952-divorced 1958), actress Claire Bloom (married 1959-divorced 1969), Sherry Nelson (married 1973-divorced 1979), Paula Ellis (married 1986-divorced 1997) and actress Joan Benedict (married 2000-his death 2002). He had a daughter, opera singer Anna Steiger (born in 1960), from his marriage to Bloom, and a son by his marriage to Ellis. Had a love affair with Diana Dors when they met during the filming of The Unholy Wife. After undergoing triple heart bypass surgery in 1976, Steiger fell into a serious depression for eight years; few of his later performances received critical acclaim, and he was frequently accused of overacting. He died in Los Angeles of pneumonia and complications from surgery for a (presumably malignant) gall bladder tumor at the age of 77. He is interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills, in Los Angeles, California. Steiger has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7080 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California. LinkabilityAccording to research at the University of Virginia, using the Internet Movie Database as a guide, Rod Steiger was the most well-linked actor in Hollywood history, if one can link two actors if they have ever appeared in a movie together. [3] The average "Steiger number" of a movie actor, meaning the number of links it takes to get from that actor to Steiger, is 2.679. By contrast, the average "Bacon number", the number of links it takes to reach Kevin Bacon, whose linkability is much more famous, is 2.955. Steiger, incidentally has a Bacon number of 2. See: Small world phenomenon. Filmography
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