Rod Steiger

Rod Steiger (Rodney Stephen Steiger, Westhampton, New York, April 14, 1925 - Los Angeles, California, July 9, 2002) was a Oscar-winning American actor.

Biography

He dropped out of school at 16 and joined the Marines. He spent World War II on a destroyer in the Pacific.

Steiger's acting career began while he was serving in the civilian navy after the war. State aid to soldiers returning from the front allowed him to enroll in the New School for Social Research, where he studied drama. In 1951 he was a student of the American Theater Wing and later of the famous Actor's Studio, an acting school of which Steiger was one of the most gifted students. He had the opportunity to intervene in the film Teresa in which he gave a correct interpretation. While he continued in the theater and on television he was offered the lead role in the television version of Marty , for which Ernest Borgnine had won an Oscar in the motion picture. Shortly after he had his real opportunity in the cinema, getting the leading role in the classic The Law of Silence , along with Marlon Brando, a film with which he became widely known.

Steiger was a great character actor. Some critics said that in his performances he exaggerated his characters. However, he had to incarnate during a good part of his career as a film actor tough individuals, and even violent, although sometimes also capable of showing the human side of him; examples of this are the films Yuma by Samuel Fuller (with Sara Montiel) and In the Heat of the Night (1967), with Sidney Poitier, for which he received an Oscar for best leading actor, and in which he plays the police chief of a small town in the South, who has to accept a visit from a black FBI agent to solve a crime.

Steiger's physique was not attractive. His appearance was not particularly pleasant and he was heavyset. For this reason, he was repeatedly given roles of strong-willed fictional and real characters. Thus he played Al Capone in the 1959 film of the same name, and Napoleon in Waterloo , a 1970 film, in which he performed an extraordinary characterization of the historical character. Later in his career, Steiger also made several films in Europe. The European directors with whom he worked knew how to take advantage of his expressive acting style, nevertheless achieving more balanced performances.

In 1977, he stepped in and made a robust characterization of Pontius Pilate in the television film that has become an Easter classic: Jesus of Nazareth. In his old age, he starred in such popular films as The Stuntman (starring Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone), Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! and Crazy in Alabama (Antonio Banderas' directorial debut).

Throughout his career in film, Steiger also remained faithful to the medium with which he began, television, appearing from time to time in films and television mini-series.

Steiger was married five times, one of them to well-known actress Claire Bloom. He had a daughter with this wife, and a son with another. He died in Los Angeles at the age of 77, as a result of pneumonia and kidney failure.

Filmography

He also had a brief role in Franco Zeffirelli's miniseries Jesus of Nazareth, as Pontius Pilate (1977), in the series Colombo in the episode Strange Bedfellows (1995) as Vincenzo Fortelli and another role in Norman Jewison's film Hurricane Carter (The Hurricane, 1999) , as a federal judge.

Awards and distinctions

Oscar Awards

Golden Globes