23/06/2022 21:28 Rod Steiger | Film | The Guardian

Film
Rod Steiger
An actor at his best playing strong characters - especially real-life
leaders - he was one of the hardest-working Oscar winners

Brian Baxter
Wed 10 Jul 2002 10.21 BST

Of all the Method actors who evolved from the Actors Studio and its tentacles, Rod
Steiger, who has died aged 77 of pneumonia and kidney failure, was arguably the
most intense. The style of performance (which could easily become overwrought
and self-conscious to the point of self-parody) was modified, even abandoned, by
most of its notable practitioners. But, for Steiger, such emotional intensity was
ingrained, and it stayed with him throughout a long career.

He said of the Method: "It encompasses anything that gets you involved personally
in a part so that you can communicate in human terms with the audience." He spent
his adult life in search of that involvement through an art form which he saw as a
means not simply of creative expression, but of personal salvation.

The results were variable. As the quality of his material and directors declined, so -
often - did his performance. As a stage actor, he often over-emoted, and needed
strong direction to channel his enormous energy and passion. Like the little girl with

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a curl in the middle of her forehead, when he was bad he was very, very bad, but
when he was good, well, Oscar came out to play.

During a formidable career that encompassed the New York stage, some 250 live
television dramas within five years and well over 100 feature films and television
movies, Steiger notched up numerous awards. There was an Oscar, two BAFTAs as
best foreign actor, recognition and prizes at international festivals, and, in 1997, a
star placed in the Walk of Fame. Three years previously, he had been nominated as
"worst supporting actor" for his role in The Specialist - a far cry from his Oscar
nomination for On the Waterfront (1954).

Contrary to popular belief, Steiger's stunning performance as Marlon Brando's older

brother was not his film debut. That had been a small part in Teresa (1951), which
had turned out an unhappy experience. Its director, Fred Zinnemann, compensated
him by casting him in the screen version of Oklahoma (1955). The part of Jud suited
his strong voice (he had trained for opera) and dark personality.

By then, Steiger was 30 and had weathered a bleak, often tough early life. Born in
Westhampton, New York, he was that son of a song-and-dance act that moved
around to find work, but his father left his wife and son to the mercy of the
depression, and young Rodney had the ignominious task - aged about eight - of
extracting his drunken mother from her haunts and joining bread queues.

His schooling was often interrupted, and he emerged a physically mature 16-year-
old, whose immediate future was decided by Pearl harbor. When America entered
the war, he lied about his age and served four years as a torpedo man, seeing active
service in the Pacific. After a medical discharge, he returned to Newark, New Jersey,
doing menial jobs, and looking after his alcoholic mother - a duty he took on for the
rest of her life, although happily she gave up drink and his later success allowed her
an easier time.

Like many of his contemporaries (Tony Curtis among them), Steiger was saved a life
of tedium by the GI Bill of Rights, which entitled him to several years of adult
education, plus enough money to live on. He chose drama, and, for the first two
years in New York, was coached (with Walter Matthau) by Erwin Piscator at the New
School for Social Research. He also studied singing and, in the late 1940s, moved to
the Actors Studio, joining some of the greatest emerging talents of the period.

It was an exciting time for Steiger. He worked in the theatre, and in television
dramas - averaging one a week. In 1951, he made his big screen debut, and, the
following year, married the first of four wives, actor Sally Gracie. In 1953, he became
a New York television star with his performance as Marty, in the hour-long version

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of the play that writer Paddy Chayevsky later expanded into a feature film. Steiger
did not get the part because he refused to sign a long-term contract.

His fame became far wider when Elia Kazan, remembering him from the Actors
Studio, cast him opposite a fellow Method actor in On The Waterfront. The taxi
scene between Steiger and Brando became part of cinema history.

His grave demeanour forever cast him in character roles, and he modelled himself
on forceful, less glamorous actors, such as Paul Muni and Charles Laughton. He
revelled in strong, "real" characters, playing Napoleon Bonaparte, Al Capone,
Pontius Pilate, WC Fields and Mussolini (twice). His performance as the vicious
Stanley Hoff, in The Big Knife (1955), with his white, close-cropped hair and
cumbersome hearing aid, remains one of the most memorably over-the-top
performances in post-war cinema. It found an echo in his corrupt boxing promoter
in Humphrey Bogart's final film, The Harder They Fall (1956).

After a couple of pot-boilers, Steiger took the part of O'Meara, an Irish-American

soldier who fires the last shot in the American civil war and later joins the Sioux. His
melancholy performance put him at odds with maverick director Samuel Fuller, and
although Run Of The Arrow (1957) has attained cult status, Steiger hated it.

He was happier with the adaptation of a Graham Greene short story, Across The
Bridge (1957), playing a German millionaire on the run in Mexico. This was a
performance of compassion and strength. In another neglected British film, The
Mark (1961), he played a psychiatrist involved with a sexual psychopath. Stuart
Whitman was outstanding as the man fighting an obsession with children, and the
cameraman-turned-director Guy Green made fine use of the widescreen black and
white photography to enhance the sombre mood.

Even these sturdy films failed to ignite Steiger's career, and he made numerous
programmes, including Cry Terror, Seven Thieves, 13 West Street and Convicts Four.
He worked in Italy, but only one film, Hands Across The City (1963), by realist
director Francesco Rosi, was of note.

But as the decade went on, he hit a roll, beginning with the film he considered his
best work, The Pawnbroker (1964). Steiger's harrowingly intense portrayal of a guilt-
ridden Holocaust survivor gained him the BAFTA as best foreign actor and an Oscar
nomination. He was disappointed not to get the statuette, but moved happily to an
outrageous role as Mr Joyboy, in a version of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One (1965),
Komarovsky in the spectacular, if dull, Dr Zhivago (1965), and then a stab at Willy
Loman, in a television version of Death Of A Salesman (1966).

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In 1967, he took, moulded and made his own the role of the bigoted sheriff in
Norman Jewison's In The Heat Of The Night. He and Sidney Poitier, as the black cop
he learns to respect, were evenly matched, but it was Steiger who scooped the
Oscar. Nothing as good came his way again. He followed it with The Sergeant,
playing a soldier infatuated with an enlisted man, then the multi-character comedy
thriller No Way To Treat A Lady (both 1968).

During a 1959 Broadway adaptation of Kurosawa's film Rashomon, Steiger co-

starred with - and married - Claire Bloom. Towards the end of their 10-year
marriage, they co-starred in two flops, The Illustrated Man and Three Into Two
Won't Go (both 1969). Their daughter Anna is now an opera singer.

As American cinema continued its steady decline, so did Steiger's career, although
he worked steadily, playing Napoleon in Waterloo, a Mexican bandit in A Fistful Of
Dynamite (both 1971) and Mussolini in The Last Days (1974). Even worse were a
Chabrol film, Innocents With Dirty Hands, the misguided Hennessy (both 1975) and
the ludicrous Amityville Horror (1979). By then, he had made 60 features, and was
to notch up many more over the next 20 plus years.

He had been briefly, and expensively, married for the third time, to Sherry Nelson,
between 1973 and 1979, and suffered clinical depression for eight years, never fully
recovering. However, a fourth marriage, to Paula Ellis from 1986 until 1997,
produced a son, Michael, and a return to some kind of normality.

By the mid-1990s, aged 70, Steiger had settled for being a jobbing actor. There had
been a few halfway-decent roles along the way in Lucky Star (1980), The Chosen
(1981), as a guest in Robert Altman's The Player (1992), as the bookstore owner in the
television mini-series Tales Of The City (1993), and as General Decker in Mars
Attacks (1996), alongside much dross.

He was prepared to travel to keep working, including to his much-loved London for
a BBC radio recording of The Old Man And The Sea. But he always returned to
Malibu, where he had homes for more than 40 years, providing some stability in a
restless life.

In 2000, he married Joan Benedict. She survives him, as do his daughter and son.

· Rodney Stephen Steiger, actor, born April 14 1925; died July 9 2002

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and

Clarifications column, Thursday July 11 2002

The right tally of Steiger spouses is five: Sally Gracie, married in 1951, Claire Bloom
1959, Sherry Nelson 1973, Paula Ellis 1986, and Joan Benedict 2000.
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