Rod Steiger
From Philosopedia
Steiger, Rodney Stephen (14 Apr 1925 - 9 July 2002)
The only child of Lutheran parents, Steiger was born in Westhampton on Long Island, New York. His parents, who had played on vaudeville, were divorced when he was a baby. His mother, who suffered from alcoholism, raised him in New Jersey as a single parent.
After Pearl Harbor, the 16-year-old lied about his age and joined the Navy, serving in the Pacific during WWII. Steiger attended drama school on the GI Bill, and eventually studied at the Actors Studio. Using Method skills, he appeared in 250-plus live TV productions, as well as on Broadway. Though he appeared in the movie Teresa (1951), Steiger didn't fully make the transition to film until his award-winning performance as the lonely title character in the 1953 TV production of Paddy Chayefsky's Marty, which helped him nab a part in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront. As Charley Malloy, Steiger shared the backseat of a cab with screen brother Marlon Brando as Brando's ex-boxer Terry laid the blame for his one-way trip to Palookaville on his corrupt older sibling.
Though Kazan had guided Steiger to his first Oscar nomination, Steiger later condemned the Academy's controversial decision to award Kazan an honorary Oscar in 1999.
After On the Waterfront, Steiger made his presence felt as a movie tycoon in his erstwhile TV director Robert Aldrich's Hollywood tale The Big Knife (1955), a scheming attorney in Otto Preminger's The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955), and (in his professional singing and dancing debut) the villain Jud Fry in Fred Zinnemann's adaptation of the Broadway musical Oklahoma! (1955).
Steiger also co-starred with Humphrey Bogart in Bogart's final film, The Harder They Fall (1956); survived Samuel Fuller-style Western sadism as an Irish-accented ex-soldier in Run of the Arrow (1957); played a psychopath in Cry Terror! (1958); and raged as the title character in Al Capone (1959) - Steiger's Capone was later credited as the inadvertent model for Robert De Niro's performance in The Untouchables (1987).
Steiger won an Oscar for best actor, playing the redneck Mississippi police chief opposite Sidney Poitier in the 1967 film "In the Heat of the Night." He played a tortured Auschwitz survivor in "The Pawnbroker." That and several other Jewish roles, such as the rigid rabbi in "The Chosen," made some fans suppose he was Jewish. According to Tim Boxer's Jewish Celebrity Anecdotes, Steiger, an agnostic, was actually born of Lutherans (cited by Warren Allen Smith in Who's Who in Hell).
Other memorable roles included portraying "Mr. Joyboy" in The Loved One, the domineering seducer of Lara in Dr. Zhivago, and Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man.
He was married five times and spoke openly of the depression he suffered during the 1980s.
In 1976, undergoing a triple heart bypass surgery, he experienced depression and had few successes thereafter.
Steiger died in Los Angeles of pneumonia and complications from surgery for a (presumably malignant) gall bladder tumor at the age of 77. He is interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills, in Los Angeles, California.
