Rod Steiger
Rodney Stephen Steiger was an American actor, noted for his portrayal of offbeat, often volatile and crazed characters. Ranked as "one of Hollywood's most charismatic and dynamic stars", he is closely associated with the art of method acting, embodying the characters he played, which at times led to clashes with directors and co-stars. He starred as Marlon Brando's mobster brother Charley in On the Waterfront, the title character Sol Nazerman in The Pawnbroker which won him the Silver Bear for Best Actor, and as police chief Bill Gillespie opposite Sidney Poitier in the film In the Heat of the Night which won him the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Steiger was born in Westhampton, New York, the son of a vaudevillian. He had a difficult childhood, running away from home to escape an alcoholic mother at the age of 16. After serving in the South Pacific during World War II, he began his acting career with television roles in 1947, and went on to garner critical acclaim for his portrayal of the main character in the teleplay "Marty". He made his stage debut in 1946, in a production of Curse You, Jack Dalton! at the Civic Repertory Theatre of Newark, and subsequently appeared in productions such as An Enemy of the People, Clifford Odets's Night Music, Seagulls Over Sorrento, and Rashomon.
Steiger made his film debut in Fred Zinnemann's Teresa in 1951, and subsequently appeared in films such as The Big Knife, Oklahoma!, Jubal, Across the Bridge, and Al Capone. After his performance in The Pawnbroker in 1964, in which he played an embittered Jewish Holocaust survivor working as a pawnbroker in New York City, he portrayed an opportunistic Russian politician in David Lean's Doctor Zhivago. In the Heat of the Night won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Steiger, who was lauded for his performance as a Mississippi police chief who learns to respect an African-American officer as they search for a killer. The following year, he played a serial killer of many guises in No Way to Treat a Lady.
During the 1970s, Steiger increasingly turned to European productions in his search for more demanding roles. He portrayed Napoleon Bonaparte in Waterloo, a Mexican bandit in Sergio Leone's Duck, You Sucker!, Benito Mussolini in Last Days of Mussolini, and ended the decade playing a disturbed priest in The Amityville Horror. By the 1980s, heart problems and depression took their toll on Steiger's career, and he found it difficult to find employment, agreeing to appear in low-budget B movies. One of his final roles was as judge H. Lee Sarokin in the prison drama The Hurricane, which reunited him with In the Heat of the Night director Norman Jewison. Steiger was married five times, and had a daughter, opera singer Anna Steiger, and a son, Michael Steiger. He died of pneumonia and kidney failure as a result of complications from surgery for a gallbladder tumor in 2002, aged 77, in Los Angeles. His fifth wife was Joan Benedict Steiger.
Early life and acting background
Steiger was born on April 14, 1925, in Westhampton, New York, the only child of Lorraine and Frederick Steiger, of French, Scottish, and German descent. Rod was raised as a Lutheran. He never knew his father, a vaudevillian who had been part of a travelling song-and-dance team with Steiger's mother, but was told that he was a handsome Latino-looking man, who was a talented musician and dancer. Biographer Tom Hutchinson describes him as a "shadowy, fugitive figure", one who "haunted" Rod throughout his life and was an "invisible presence and unseen influence".Hutchinson described Steiger's mother as "plump, energetic and small, with long auburn hair". She had a good singing voice and nearly became a Hollywood actress, but after a leg surgery permanently impaired her walking ability, she gave up acting and turned to alcohol. As a result, she quit show business and moved away from Westhampton to raise her son. They moved through several towns, including Irvington and Bloomfield, before settling in Newark, New Jersey. Her alcoholism caused Steiger much embarrassment, and the family was frequently mocked by other children and their parents within the community. At the age of five he was sexually abused by a pedophile who lured him in with a butterfly collection. Steiger said of his troubled family background: "If you had the choice of having the childhood you experienced, with your alcoholic mother and being the famous actor you are today, or having a loving, secure childhood and not being famous, which would you take? A loving, secure childhood in a New York minute". During the last 11 years of her life, Steiger's mother stayed sober and regularly attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Steiger recalled: "I was so proud of her. She turned herself around. She came alive again".
During his childhood, and owing to his considerable strength and bulk, Steiger became known as "The Rock". Despite being mocked over his mother's alcoholism, he was a popular figure at school and an able softball player. He displayed an interest in writing poetry and acting during his adolescent years, and appeared in several school plays while at West Side High School in Newark. Tired of fighting with his mother, he ran away from home at age sixteen to join the United States Navy during World War II.
He enlisted on May 11, 1942, and received his training at the US Naval Training Station in Newport, Rhode Island. He joined the newly commissioned USS Taussig on May 20, 1944. While serving as a torpedoman on destroyers, he saw action in the South Pacific, including the Battle of Iwo Jima. Steiger later commented: "I loved the Navy. I was stupid enough to think I was being heroic." His experiences during the war haunted him for the rest of his life, particularly the loss of Americans during the Battle of Iwo Jima, as well as the sinking of vessels by the Taussig which were known to have women and children aboard. On December 17, 1944, off the coast of Luzon in the Philippines, Steiger and the Taussig encountered Typhoon Cobra, which became known as Halsey's Typhoon, with winds reaching one hundred knots and waves. As a result, three U.S. destroyers were lost, but the Taussig survived, with Steiger tying a rope to himself on deck and flattening himself as waves engulfed the ship.
After the war, the GI Bill paid for his rent at a room on West 81st Street in New York City, an income of just over $100 a month, and four years of schooling. He initially found a job oiling machines and washing floors. He decided to attend a drama class, primarily because of its membership of attractive young women. Known as the Civil Service Little Theater group, it was conducted by the Office of Dependents and Beneficiaries, where he was employed at the time. This led him to start a two-year course at the New School for Social Research, run by German émigré Erwin Piscator. During one audition, Steiger was cast after barely uttering a few words, the director exclaiming he had a "fresh, wonderful quality". Another talented pupil at the time was Walter Matthau, who dubbed the institution "The Neurotic School for Sexual Research". Steiger was surprised to discover his own talent as an actor, and he was encouraged to pursue further studies at the Dramatic Workshop. One of the main reasons he wanted to be an actor was to regain public respect for his family name, which had so humiliated him during childhood. Another important factor was his belief that he did not "have the temperament for a regular job", and would have ended up a miserable, violent alcoholic. His only role model as an actor was Paul Muni, who he thought was "the greatest", although he also had a deep respect for French actor Harry Baur and, according to biographer Hutchinson, he admired Charlie Chaplin "to the point of adoration".
Career
Early career and breakthrough (1946–1956)
Steiger made his stage debut in a production of Curse You, Jack Dalton! at the Civic Repertory Theatre of Newark. Subsequent to this, he received an invitation from one of his teachers, Daniel Mann, to attend the Actors Studio, established by Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, and Cheryl Crawford in October 1947. It was here, along with Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, and Eli Wallach, that he studied method acting, which became deeply engrained in him. Lacking matinée idol looks, much like Malden and Wallach, he began pursuing a career as a character actor rather than as a leading man. Steiger's stage work continued in 1950, with a minor role as a townperson in a stage production of An Enemy of the People at the Music Box Theatre. His first major role on Broadway came in Clifford Odets's production of Night Music, where he played A. L. Rosenberger. The play was held at the ANTA Playhouse. The following year, he played a telegraphist in the play Seagulls Over Sorrento, performed at the John Golden Theatre beginning on September 11, 1952.Steiger's early roles, although minor, were numerous, especially in television series during the early 1950s, when he appeared in more than 250 live television productions over a five-year period. He was spotted by Fred Coe, NBC's manager of program development, who increasingly gave him bigger parts. Steiger considered television to be what repertory theatre had been for an earlier generation, and saw it as a place where he could test his talent with a plethora of different roles. Soon afterward he began receiving positive reviews from critics such as John Crosby, who noted that Steiger regularly gave "effortless persuasive performances". Among Steiger's credits were Danger, Lux Video Theatre, Out There, Tales of Tomorrow, The Gulf Playhouse, Medallion Theatre, Goodyear Television Playhouse, and as Shakespeare's Romeo in "The First Command Performance of Romeo and Juliet " episode of You Are There in 1954, under director Sidney Lumet. He continued to make appearances in various playhouse television productions, appearing in five episodes of Kraft Theatre, which earned him praise from critics, six episodes of The Philco Television Playhouse and two episodes of Schlitz Playhouse of Stars. Steiger made his big screen debut in 1953, with a small role in Fred Zinnemann's Teresa, shot in 1951. Steiger, who described himself as "cocky", won over Zinnemann by praising his direction. Zinnemann recalled that Steiger was "very popular, extremely articulate and full of remarkable memories", and the two remained highly respectful of each other for life.
On May 24, 1953, Steiger played the title role in Paddy Chayefsky's "Marty" episode of the Goodyear Television Playhouse. The role had originally been intended for Martin Ritt, who later became a director. "Marty" is the story of a lonely and homely butcher from the Bronx in search of love. The play was a critical success that increased Steiger's public exposure; Tom Stempel noted that he brought "striking intensity to his performance as Marty, particularly in giving us Marty's pain". As Steiger refused to sign a seven-year studio contract, he was replaced with Ernest Borgnine in the film Marty, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, as well as the Best Actor Oscar for Borgnine. 1953 proved to be Steiger's breakthrough year; he garnered Sylvania Awards for Marty and four other best performances of the year—as Vishinsky and Rudolf Hess in two episodes of You Are There, as gangster Dutch Schultz in a thriller, and as a radar operator in My Brother's Keeper.
File:Rod Steiger Marlon Brando On the Waterfront.jpg|thumb|left|250px|Steiger with Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront
For his role as Charley "the Gent", the brother of Marlon Brando's character in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront, Steiger was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Film writer Leo Braudy wrote that the "incessantly repeated images of its taxicab confrontation between Brando and Rod Steiger have made the film iconic". The taxicab scene took eleven hours to shoot and was heavily scripted, despite Brando fuelling the popular myth in his autobiography that the scene was improvised. Brando stated that seven takes were needed because Steiger could not stop crying, which Steiger found to be unfair and inaccurate. Although Steiger retained great respect for Brando as an actor, he disliked him as a person and frequently complained during the production of Brando's "predilection for leaving the set" immediately after shooting his scenes. Steiger later remarked: "We didn't get to know each other at all. He always flew solo and I haven't seen him since the film. I do resent him saying he's just a hooker, and that actors are whores". Steiger also responded unfavorably when he learned that Kazan had been awarded an honorary Oscar by the Academy in 1999. In a 1999 interview with BBC News, Steiger said he probably would not have done On the Waterfront if he'd known at the time that Kazan had provided the House Un-American Activities Committee with names of performers suspected of being Communists.
Steiger played Jud Fry in the film version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!, in which he performed his own singing. It was one of the biggest location film productions of the 1950s, shot near Nogales, Arizona, with a crew of 325 people and some 70 trucks. Steiger portrayed a disturbed, emotionally isolated version of Jud, which television channel Turner Classic Movies believed brought a "complexity to the character that went far beyond the stock musical villain". Steiger observed that James Dean, who auditioned for the role that went to Gordon MacRae, was a "nice kid absorbed by his own ego, so much so that it was destroying him", which he thought led to his death. Dean reportedly gave Steiger his prized copy of Ernest Hemingway's book Death in the Afternoon, and had underlined every appearance of the word "death".
Later in 1955, Steiger played an obnoxious film tycoon, loosely based on Columbia boss Harry Cohn, opposite Jack Palance and Ida Lupino in Robert Aldrich's film noir The Big Knife. Steiger bleached his hair for the part, sought inspiration for the role from Russian actor Vladimir Sokoloff, read a book about the Treblinka extermination camp to understand his character thoroughly, and visited the perfume department of a store in Beverly Hills, California, to try to understand his character's contempt for women. Steiger and Palance did not get along during the production, and in one scene Palance threw several record albums at Steiger in frustration, feeling that he was trying to steal the scene. Steiger earned critical acclaim later that year for a role as a prosecuting major in Otto Preminger's The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, alongside Gary Cooper and Charles Bickford.
Steiger played the character "Pinky" in Columbia Pictures' western, Jubal, which co-starred Glenn Ford and Ernest Borgnine. Steiger's character is a rancher, a "sneering baddie", who becomes jealous when his former mistress becomes attracted to Ford's character. Ford noted Steiger's deep commitment to method acting during production, considering him to be a "fine actor but a real strange fellow". Steiger disliked the experience and frequently clashed with director Delmer Daves, who was more favorable to Ford's lighthearted take on the film. Upon its release in April 1956, a writer for Variety was impressed with the "evil venom" displayed by his character, and remarked that there had not "been as hateful a screen heavy around in a long time".
In Mark Robson's 1956 boxing film noir The Harder They Fall, Steiger played a crooked boxing promoter who hires a sports journalist. Steiger referred to Bogart as "a professional" who had "tremendous authority" during filming.