Rod Steiger

Rod Steiger was an American actor born on April 14, 1925, in Westhampton, New York, the son of a vaudevillian father he never knew and a mother who had once aspired to a Hollywood career before an injury ended her ambitions and led her to alcoholism. Steiger grew up moving through several New Jersey towns, eventually settling in Newark, where he attended West Side High School and appeared in school productions. At sixteen, he ran away from home and enlisted in the United States Navy on May 11, 1942. He served as a torpedoman on destroyers in the South Pacific, seeing action at the Battle of Iwo Jima, and survived Typhoon Cobra off the coast of Luzon in December 1944 while aboard the USS Taussig. After the war, the GI Bill funded his studies, leading him first to the Civil Service Little Theater group and then to a two-year course at the New School for Social Research under Erwin Piscator, followed by further training at the Dramatic Workshop.

Steiger made his stage debut in 1946 in a production of Curse You, Jack Dalton! at the Civic Repertory Theatre of Newark. His Broadway career spanned from 1950 to 1962 and included An Enemy of the People in 1950, Clifford Odets's Night Music in 1951, Seagulls Over Sorrento in 1952, the play Moby Dick, Rashomon in 1959, and the play An Enemy of the People. Before his Broadway work gained momentum, he had already begun building a television reputation, launching his screen career with television roles in 1947 and earning significant critical attention for his portrayal of the title character in the 1953 teleplay Marty.

His film debut came in Fred Zinnemann's Teresa in 1951, and he went on to appear in a range of notable productions throughout the decade, including The Big Knife, Oklahoma!, Jubal, Across the Bridge, and Al Capone. A pivotal early film role came in 1954, when he played Marlon Brando's mobster brother Charley in On the Waterfront. In 1964, Steiger starred as Sol Nazerman, an embittered Jewish Holocaust survivor working as a pawnbroker in New York City, in The Pawnbroker, a performance that earned him the Silver Bear for Best Actor. The following year he appeared in David Lean's Doctor Zhivago as an opportunistic Russian politician, and in 1968 he played a serial killer of many guises in No Way to Treat a Lady.

The role that brought Steiger his greatest industry recognition was that of Mississippi police chief Bill Gillespie in In the Heat of the Night in 1967, opposite Sidney Poitier. The film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and Steiger received the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of a police chief who comes to respect an African-American officer as they investigate a murder. The film was directed by Norman Jewison, with whom Steiger would later reunite on The Hurricane in 1999, playing judge H. Lee Sarokin.

During the 1970s, Steiger pursued more demanding roles through European productions, portraying Napoleon Bonaparte in Waterloo in 1970, a Mexican bandit in Sergio Leone's Duck, You Sucker! in 1971, Benito Mussolini in Last Days of Mussolini in 1975, and a disturbed priest in The Amityville Horror in 1979. Heart problems and depression affected his career through the 1980s, during which he took on roles in low-budget productions. Steiger was married five times, and his fifth wife was Joan Benedict Steiger. He had two children: a daughter, opera singer Anna Steiger, and a son, Michael Steiger. He died on July 9, 2002, in Los Angeles, of pneumonia and kidney failure following complications from surgery for a gallbladder tumor, at the age of 77.