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Roy Scheider
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Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:
If you need someone to help you do away with a great white shark, here's your man. This rugged, versatile actor with the weatherbeaten face is equally effective in lead and character roles. Scheider originally envisioned an athletic career as a teenager, playing amateur baseball and entering the New Jersey Diamond Gloves boxing competition. He changed his mind while in college, and he studied drama at both Rutgers and William and Mary. After three years in the Air Force, Scheider began taking theater seriously, appearing with the New York Shakespeare Festival and winning an Obie award in 1968 for his performance in "Stephen D." Scheider's screen career began inauspiciously with a role in Curse of the Living Corpse (1963, billed as Roy R. Sheider sic). Other parts followed in Paper Lion (1968), Stiletto(1969), Loving Puzzle of a Downfall Child (both 1970). Then in 1971 he hit pay dirt with supporting parts in two pictures, Klute and The French Connection The latter was one of the year's biggest hits, and Scheider earned an Oscar nomination as second banana to Gene Hackman's "Popeye" Doyle. He spent two years in France, returning to Hollywood to star in the French Connection-inspired The SevenUps (1973), again as a police detective.
In 1975, Scheider starred in Jaws which would eventually become the highest grossing film of all time (since surpassed), playing-naturally-a police chief in a small seaside community terrorized by a great white shark. He accepted a supporting role in Marathon Man (1976), appearing with Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier, but was back in the top slot in Sorcerer (1977), Jaws 2 (1978), and Last Embrace (1979). Determined to break the tough-cop mold, Scheider starred in 1979's All That Jazz a flamboyant, semiautobiographical look at the life (and death) of choreographer/director Bob Fosse. This eye-opening performance landed Scheider another Oscar nomination. He again proved to be a perfect Everyman in the underrated science fiction saga 2010 (1984), but for reasons that are difficult to understand, his career floundered. There were high-profile misfires like Still of the Night (1982) and Blue Thunder (1983), long absences from the screen, and forgettable films like The Men's Club (1986), 52 Pick-Up (1986), Cohen and Tate, Listen to Me, Night Game (all 1989), and The Fourth War (1990). He also narrated Mishima (1985). By the 1990s he was turning up-if at all-in costarring parts, as in The Russia House (1990) and Naked Lunch (1991). In 1993 he regained the rank of star on Steven Spielberg's ambitious sci-fi television series "seaQuest DSV." He costarred in Romeo Is Bleeding (1994). |  |
