ROY SCHEIDERRoy Scheider, who died on 10 February, 2008, aged 74, was an Oscar-nominated Hollywood tough man best known for his leading role in Steven Spielberg’s iconic thriller Jaws (1975).
His distinctive looks, formed on the junior boxing circuit, saw him play a series of hard but flawed characters in classic films like The French Connection (1971) and Marathon Man (1976). But this tough demeanour belied a background of Shakespearean theatre.
Roy Richard Scheider was born on 10 November, 1932, in Orange County, New Jersey. His father was a German Protestant who worked as a mechanic and his mother was an Irish Catholic. As a child he suffered from rheumatic fever and took up boxing as a way of rebuilding his strength, gaining his broken nose in a New Jersey Diamond Gloves competition.
He studied at Rutgers University in New York and Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, graduating with a history major. He had originally intended to be a lawyer but after becoming involved with the college’s theatre group he decided acting was the vocation for him.
Following three years as an air traffic controller with the US Air Force he returned to college where he played Richard III. Shortly afterwards he was hired by the producer Joseph Papp for the role of Mercutio in a festival production of Romeo and Juliet, the first of many parts in a decade of theatre work.
Low-budget horror The Curse of the Living Corpse (1964) saw Scheider cast in his first film role and he began acting in soap operas and cop dramas. He first came to prominence in Hollywood when he played a pimp in the twisted thriller Klute (1971). Leading lady Jane Fonda won the ‘Best Actress’ Oscar for her role, the first of several awards for Mr Scheider’s co-stars during the 1970s.
Later that year he teamed up with Gene Hackman in the intense detective film The French Connection, famed for its car chases and fight scenes. Hackman took one of five Oscars the film won and Mr Scheider was nominated in the ‘Best Actor in a Supporting Role’ category.
Having starred in The French Connection, Mr Scheider then appeared in several French-made thrillers, before returning to Hollywood in The Seven-Ups (1973), a film which aimed, with moderate success, to go one better than The French Connection with even more dramatic action scenes.
However, his defining performance came in Jaws, the seminal shark horror that made Steven Spielberg’s name and emptied beaches around the world over the summer of 1975. He played Martin Brody, the new police chief at a holiday resort terrorised by a giant shark and one of three men to head out in a dilapidated fishing boat to hunt the creature.
His next role was another classic thriller, Marathon Man, in which he played Dustin Hoffman’s brother, Henry ‘Doc’ Levy. ‘Doc’, it transpires, is not an oil company executive as he purports, but in fact a secret agent, whose death throws his brother into the midst of a perilous Nazi conspiracy.
He reunited with French Connection director William Friedkin for South African thriller Sorcerer (1977) then he tackled another giant shark in lacklustre sequel Jaws 2 (1978). If it weren’t for Jaws 2, the lead role in The Deer Hunter (1978) could have been his, but instead it went to Robert De Niro who was nominated for an Oscar.
He broke from his typecasting in the surreal musical All That Jazz (1979), losing out on the ‘Best Actor’ Oscar to former co-star Dustin Hoffman. But he soon returned to the male leads he had been previously associated with in thrillers like Still of the Night (1982) and Blue Thunder (1983), also dabbling in sci-fi with 2010 (1984).
The 1980s also saw him return to the stage in a production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (1980). For the remainder of his cinematic career he was largely cast in the lead role of mediocre movies, notable exceptions being the sadistic Doctor Benway in David Cronenberg’s 1991 homage to Naked Lunch by William S Burroughs and narrating Mishima, the 1985 biopic of Japan’s celebrated author.
He continued to work in film and television until his death, appearing in Wes Craven’s ill-advised Dracula sequels and as Captain Bridger in the flop submarine series SeaQuest DSV – he literally jumped ship after the second series, shortly before the show was axed because of poor ratings. He also leant his voice to several documentaries.
In his later years he was a key figure in the Sag Harbor community in New York, helping to found a local school. He was married twice and had a daughter from the first marriage and a son and a daughter from the second. He was diagnosed with the incurable cancer myeloma in 2004 and died from a related infection in February 2008. He had recently finished work on two films, Iron Cross and Dark Honeymoon.
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