Rod Steiger on screen and stage
Rod Steiger was an American actor who had an extensive career in film, television, and stage. He made his stage debut in 1946 with Civic Repertory Theatre's production of the melodrama Curse you, Jack Dalton!. He worked onstage in a production of An Enemy of the People at the Music Box Theatre. He had a small role in his film debut Teresa (1951). In 1953, he played the title role in the teleplay "Marty" and reprised the role for the 1955 film adaptation. He had a breakout role for the crime film On the Waterfront (1954), and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Steiger starred in the musical film Oklahoma! (1955).
Steiger played a crooked promoter in Mark Robson's boxing film noir The Harder They Fall (1956). In the British thriller Across the Bridge (1957), he played a German con-artist on the run in Mexico. He starred in Andrew L. Stone's thriller film Cry Terror! (1958). He played a real-life businessman Al Capone in Richard Wilson's 1959 biopic film of the same name. He played the lieutenant commander of the USS Satterlee set in Normandy landings for the war film The Longest Day (1962). Steiger played an highly educated blind man traveling West to found a school for the blind in California, in the S-4 / E-28 episode on the long-running Western TV series Wagon Train, "The Saul Bevins Story" (1961). For playing a survivor of the Holocaust in the drama The Pawnbroker (1964), he garnered a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, and nominations for the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award in the same category. The following year, he was cast in the role of a ruthless Russian Empire politician caught up in the 1917 Russian Revolutions and following Civil War in the epic Doctor Zhivago, which was the biggest box-office success of the 1960s, and was included in AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies. He won an Academy Award, a BAFTA and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for Norman Jewison's mystery drama In the Heat of the Night (1967), playing a Southern small town police chief coping with an unexpected murder. He played a serial killer in the thriller film No Way to Treat a Lady (1968), and ended the decade with the box-office bomb film Three into Two Won't Go (1969).
In the 1970s, Steiger starred in foreign productions and independent films in search of more demanding roles. His roles during the period include Waterloo (1970), about the famous 1815 battle ending the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, Duck, You Sucker! (1971), about the Irish Republican Army revolutionary in Mexico during their 1910-20 revolutionary period, 'Last Days of Mussolini (1975), about the Fascist Italian dictator in World War II, W. C. Fields and Me (1976), Roman Empire governor Pontius Pilate in Jesus of Nazareth (1977 TV miniseries), F.I.S.T. (1978), as a 1930s labor union boss, and The Amityville Horror (1979). After suffering a heart attack in 1979 and undergoing surgery, his poor health and subsequent unfortunate psychological depression took its toll on Steiger's career, and he was forced to appear in several low-budget B movies. Although he was nominated the following year for the Genie Award for Best Performance by a Foreign Actor for his roles in the Canadian productions Klondike Fever and The Lucky Star in 1980, and won the Montréal World Film Festival Award for Best Actor the next year for Jeremy Kagan's The Chosen (1981), his subsequent roles were mainly in low-budget films. In 1989, he played authority figures in two films, including The January Man and Tennessee Waltz.
In 1990, Steiger starred in Men of Respect, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's play Macbeth. His role in the critically panned thriller film, The Specialist (1994), earned him a nomination for the infamous Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actor. Steiger appeared in both films, Shiloh (1995) and Shiloh 2: Shiloh Season (1998). He reunited with Jewison for the biopic film The Hurricane (1999), in which he played judge H. Lee Sarokin. He starred in the drama film The Last Producer (2000) and made his final film role for Poolhall Junkies (2002).