Rod Steiger, the stocky, intense actor who played Marlon Brando’s hoodlum brother in ”On the Waterfront” and won an Oscar as a redneck Southern police chief in ”In the Heat of the Night,” died on Tuesday. He was 77.
Steiger died at a hospital from pneumonia and kidney failure, which developed after his gallbladder was removed, said his publicist, Lori DeWaal.
A devoted practitioner of method acting, Steiger prided himself in taking challenging roles. He had more than 100 movie and television credits, convincingly portraying such figures as Mussolini, Rasputin, Pope John XXIII, Rudolf Hess, Pontius Pilate, Napoleon, W.C. Fields and Al Capone.
Scores of other roles were entirely forgettable.
”I’m 60% virgin and 40% whore,” Steiger said in a 2000 interview. ”I’ve not sold out that much, and I’ve made my own mistakes.”
”On the Waterfront,” the 1954 blockbuster about racketeering on the New York and New Jersey docks in the 1950s, features one of the greatest exchanges ever put on film. As the two brothers ride in the back of a taxi, Brando castigates Steiger for making him throw a boxing match: ”I coulda had class! I coulda been a contender.”
The film won seven Academy Awards, including honours for Brando and director Elia Kazan. Steiger had to make do with an Oscar nomination.
He won the Academy Award for best actor in 1967 for ”In the Heat of the Night,” in which he played a bigoted lawman who grudgingly becomes the ally of a visiting black detective portrayed by Sidney Poitier. The film remains a riveting portrait of racial tension during the civil rights era.
Steiger also received an Oscar nomination for the 1965 film ”The Pawnbroker.” He played a Jew living a secluded life in Harlem, haunted by memories of his life in a Nazi camp. It was the film of which he was most proud.
”I always tried to put him in every film I did because to me, he was like an anchor for the rest of the cast,” said Norman Jewison, director of ”In the Heat of the Night.” Jewison also directed Steiger in 1999’s ”The Hurricane,” starring Denzel Washington, and 1978’s ”F.I.S.T.,” starring Sylvester Stallone as a Hoffa-like union boss.
Steiger admitted making a mistake in declining the starring role in ”Patton,” believing the film would glorify war and killing. George C. Scott got the part, and it brought him an Oscar (which he refused).
Rodney Stephen Steiger was born April 14, 1925, in Westhampton, New York, the only child of a struggling song-and-dance team that parted soon after his birth. His mother married again, and the boy grew up in a quarrelsome household in Newark, New Jersey.
Lying about his age, he enlisted in the Navy at 16 and served in the South Pacific. Back in New Jersey after the war, Steiger was soon studying drama at the New School for Social Research. He was accepted into the Actors Studio, joining a class that included Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden and Kim Stanley. It was there, he said, that he learned to ”act from the inside out.”
”I learned what it means to talk to other persons in the story instead of reading lines in a phony voice,” he said in a 1956 interview. He also credited psychoanalysis as an aid to his acting.
Like other actors of his generation, Steiger was seasoned in live television; between 1947 and 1953, he appeared in more than 250 dramas.
Kazan – Steiger’s mentor at the Actors Studio – chose him to play Brando’s betraying older brother. Kazan wrote in his 1988 autobiography, ”A Life,” that he shot Brando’s close-ups first because the actor had to leave the set early. Steiger complained that Kazan was favouring Brando. Kazan wrote: ”I believe what had happened hurt his self-esteem but not his performance. If Steiger has played a scene better than that one, I have yet to see it.”
Steiger later was one of the performers who spoke out against giving Kazan a special career Oscar in 1999. Kazan was reviled by some in Hollywood for cooperating with the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the McCarthy era.
”Age and ability in the arts or anything else, in my opinion, does not excuse a crime,” Steiger said.
Steiger was married and divorced four times: to Sally Gracie, actress Claire Bloom, Sherry Nelson and Paula Ellis. He and Bloom had a daughter, Anna, now an opera singer. He and Ellis had a son, Michael Winston, in 1993. In 2000, he married Joan Benedict.
An interviewer once asked Steiger how he would like to die. He replied: ”I don’t want to, but if it’s in front of a camera I wouldn’t mind.” His choice of an epitaph: ”See you later.” – Sapa-AP