Roy Scheider

Roy Scheider was an American actor and amateur boxer born on November 10, 1932, in Orange, New Jersey, to Anna Crosson Scheider, who was of Irish Catholic descent, and Roy Bernhard Scheider, a Protestant German American auto mechanic. He died on February 10, 2008. Over the course of his career, Scheider received two Academy Award nominations, one Golden Globe nomination, and one BAFTA nomination.

As a child in New Jersey, Scheider participated in organized baseball and boxing, competing as a welterweight at 140 pounds. Between 1946 and 1949, he boxed as an amateur, entering the Diamond Gloves Tournament in Elizabeth, New Jersey. In his second bout at the 1946 Diamond Gloves Tournament, he suffered a broken nose and lost by technical knockout in two rounds to Myron Greenberg, though he later reversed that defeat and finished with an 11–1 record including six knockouts. He attended Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, graduating in 1950, and was inducted into the school's hall of fame in 1985. He subsequently studied drama at Rutgers University and Franklin and Marshall College, where he joined the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. From 1955 to 1958, he served in the United States Air Force as a first lieutenant in air operations, then continued as a captain in the Air Force Reserve Command until 1964.

Scheider's Broadway career spanned from 1964 to 1980. He appeared in The Chinese Prime Minister and Tartuffe, and starred in Betrayal. Alongside his stage work, he built a substantial presence in New York theater more broadly, appearing with the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1968 and winning an Obie Award for Distinguished Performance in Stephen D, Hugh Leonard's play adapted from the works of James Joyce, which he performed 68 times at the East 74th Street Theater.

His screen career began in 1964 with a role in the horror film The Curse of the Living Corpse. Television work followed, including recurring roles on the CBS soap operas Love of Life and The Secret Storm, as well as appearances in episodes of Camera Three, N.Y.P.D., and Coronet Blue, and the TV movie Lamp at Midnight in 1966. Film roles in Stiletto, Loving, and Puzzle of a Downfall Child came in 1969 and 1970.

Scheider's film prominence rose sharply in 1971 with two major releases. In Alan Pakula's Klute, he played Frank Ligourin, and in William Friedkin's The French Connection, he portrayed a fictionalized version of New York City detective Sonny Grosso, a performance that earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He returned to Europe for supporting roles in The French Conspiracy and The Outside Man, both in 1972. His first starring role came in 1973's The Seven-Ups, a quasi-sequel to The French Connection in which his character was again based on Grosso.

Scheider reached a wider audience with his portrayal of Police Chief Martin Brody in Steven Spielberg's Jaws in 1975, alongside Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss. His ad-libbed line from that film, "You're gonna need a bigger boat," was later ranked 35th on the American Film Institute's list of best movie quotes. He appeared as secret agent Doc Levy in Marathon Man in 1976, with Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier. He reunited with Friedkin for Sorcerer in 1977, an adaptation of the 1950 French novel The Wages of Fear. After dropping out of Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter two weeks before filming began, Scheider fulfilled his contractual obligations to Universal by reprising the role of Martin Brody in Jaws 2, released in 1978 to considerable box-office success. That same year he starred in Jonathan Demme's thriller Last Embrace.

His second Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Actor, came for his role as Joe Gideon in All That Jazz in 1979, in which he played a fictionalized version of director and co-writer Bob Fosse. After a less successful pairing with Meryl Streep in Robert Benton's Still of the Night in 1982, Scheider rebounded with John Badham's Blue Thunder in 1983, playing Frank Murphy in a film centered on a prototype attack helicopter deployed over Los Angeles during the 1984 Summer Olympics. He also completed two TV movies that year: Jacobo Timerman: Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number and Tiger Town. In 1984, he took on the role of Dr. Heywood Floyd in Peter Hyams' 2010, a sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and provided narration for Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters in 1985.

Through the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Scheider appeared in a steady stream of films including 52 Pick-Up for John Frankenheimer in 1986, Cohen and Tate in 1988, The Fourth War again for Frankenheimer in 1990, and The Russia House in 1990. He played Dr. Benway in the 1991 film adaptation of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, a mob boss in the Gary Oldman crime film Romeo Is Bleeding in 1993, and a corrupt insurance executive in Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker in 1997, opposite Matt Damon. His performance in the ensemble film The Myth of Fingerprints, also in 1997, earned him an Independent Spirit Award nomination.

From 1993 to 1996, Scheider starred as Captain Nathan Bridger in the Steven Spielberg-produced NBC television series seaQuest DSV. He appeared in The Punisher in 2004 as the father of the film's protagonist Frank Castle, and in 2007 starred in The Poet and If I Didn't Care. At the time of his death in February 2008, he had completed Dark Honeymoon and had filmed the lead role of Joseph, a Holocaust survivor, in Iron Cross, a film inspired by director Joshua Newton's late father Bruno Newton, which was ultimately released in 2011.