96 Facts About Rod Steiger

Rodney Stephen Steiger was an American actor, noted for his portrayal of offbeat, often volatile and crazed characters.

Rod Steiger 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.

Rod Steiger had a difficult childhood, with an alcoholic mother from whom he ran away at the age of 16.

Rod Steiger died of pneumonia and kidney failure as a result of complications from surgery for a gallbladder tumor on July 9,2002, aged 77, in Los Angeles, and was survived by his fifth wife Joan Benedict Steiger.

Rod Steiger was born on April 14,1925, in Westhampton, New York, the only child of Lorraine and Frederick Rod Steiger, of French, Scottish and German descent.

Rod Steiger 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.

Rod Steiger's alcoholism caused Steiger much embarrassment, and the family was frequently mocked by other children and their parents within the community.

Rod Steiger 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.

Rod Steiger enlisted on May 11,1942, and received his training at the US Naval Training Station in Newport, Rhode Island.

Rod Steiger joined the newly commissioned USS Taussig on May 20,1944.

Rod Steiger initially found a job oiling machines and washing floors.

Rod Steiger decided to attend a drama class, primarily because of its membership of attractive young women.

Rod Steiger was spotted by Fred Coe, NBC's manager of program development, who increasingly gave him bigger parts.

Rod 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.

Rod Steiger 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.

Rod Steiger made his big screen debut in 1953, with a small role in Fred Zinnemann's Teresa, shot in 1951.

Rod Steiger, who described himself as "cocky", won over Zinnemann by praising his direction.

Zinnemann recalled that Rod 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, Rod Steiger played the title role in Paddy Chayefsky's "Marty" episode of the Goodyear Television Playhouse.

Rod Steiger always flew solo and I haven't seen him since the film.

Rod Steiger responded unfavorably when he learned that Kazan had been awarded an honorary Oscar by the Academy in 1999.

Rod 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".

Rod 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.

Later in 1955, Rod 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.

Rod 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.

Rod Steiger portrayed the character "Pinky" in Columbia Pictures' western, Jubal, which co-starred Glenn Ford and Ernest Borgnine.

Rod Steiger's character is a rancher, a "sneering baddie", who becomes jealous when his former mistress becomes attracted to Ford's character.

Rod Steiger disliked the experience and frequently clashed with director Delmer Daves, who was more favorable to Ford's lighthearted take on the film.

In Mark Robson's The Harder They Fall, Rod Steiger played a crooked boxing promoter who hires a sports journalist.

Rod Steiger referred to Bogart as "a professional" who had "tremendous authority" during filming.

Rod Steiger had researched the history behind the film and decided to play the character as an Irishman, becoming "the first Irish cowboy" as he put it.

Later that year, Rod Steiger took the lead role in the British thriller Across the Bridge, in which he played a German conman with British citizenship who goes into hiding in Mexico after embezzling company funds.

Rod Steiger was particularly keen on demonstrating the showiness of Capone, speaking thunderously, slinging a camel-hair coat over his shoulders and wearing his hat at a jaunty angle.

Rod Steiger's performance was so convincing that, after the film was released, he received a call from a psychiatric institution asking him to attend one of their board meetings.

Rod Steiger increasingly played in films in Italy and France during this period.

Rod Steiger played a small role of a destroyer commander among the large ensemble cast of The Longest Day, which included John Wayne, Richard Todd, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Sean Connery and Henry Fonda.

Shortly after Hands over the City, Rod Steiger agreed to appear in another Italian film, Time of Indifference, in which he starred opposite Claudia Cardinale and Shelley Winters.

In Sidney Lumet's gritty drama The Pawnbroker, Rod Steiger played an embittered, emotionally withdrawn survivor of the Holocaust living in New York City.

Richard Harland Smith of TCM notes that Rod Steiger's career was waning at the time, and he had to "scramble for paying gigs for a decade" before getting this part.

Rod Steiger read Edward Lewis Wallant's novel and the script many times to develop an intimate understanding of the character, and insisted on reducing his lines to make his character more realistic and alienated from society.

Cecil Wilson of the Daily Mail wrote that Rod Steiger's character "seems to encompass all the agony ever inflicted on man".

In 1965, Rod Steiger played an effeminate embalmer in Tony Richardson's comedy The Loved One, about the funeral business in Los Angeles, based on the 1948 short satirical novel by Evelyn Waugh.

Rod Steiger offended Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who found his character repellent.

Rod Steiger won the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Chief of Police Bill Gillespie in In the Heat of the Night, opposite Sidney Poitier.

Rod Steiger played a Southern police chief searching for a murderer.

The film deals with the way the two men interact and join forces in solving the crime, as Rod Steiger's Gillespie learns to greatly respect the black man he initially took to be a criminal.

Rod Steiger drew upon his experience in the Navy with a Southerner named "King", remembering his accent.

In 1968, Rod Steiger played a serial killer opposite George Segal in Jack Smight's black comedy thriller No Way to Treat a Lady.

The film and Rod Steiger's performance were critically acclaimed, with Vincent Canby of The New York Times highlighting Rod Steiger's "beautifully uninhibited performance as a hammy", and a writer for Time Out describing him as "brilliant as a sort of Boston strangler, son of a great actress who has left her boy with a mother fixation".

Later in 1968, Rod Steiger played a repressed gay non-commissioned officer opposite John Phillip Law in John Flynn's The Sergeant for Warner Bros.

Rod Steiger was cast as a short-tempered tattooed man with soon-to-be ex-wife Claire Bloom in the science fiction picture The Illustrated Man.

Rod Steiger had better luck alongside Bloom later that year in Peter Hall's British drama Three into Two Won't Go, playing an Irishman who cheats on his wife with a young hiker.

Rod Steiger was offered the title role in Patton, but turned it down because he did not want to glorify war.

Rod Steiger auditioned for the role of Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, a film adaptation of Italian American author Mario Puzo's 1969 novel of the same name, but Puzo felt that Rod Steiger was too old for the part and rejected him.

In 1975, Rod Steiger portrayed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in Carlo Lizzani's Last Days of Mussolini, which received a positive critical reception.

Rod Steiger appeared in Claude Chabrol's French picture Innocents with Dirty Hands, playing the role of Louis Wormser, the wealthy alcoholic husband of Romy Schneider's character Julie Wormser.

Rod Steiger was highly critical of Chabrol's lack of communication and aloofness from the production, and preference for playing chess on set instead of talking through scenes.

Mr Rod Steiger surpasses his own earlier records for lumbering busyness.

Rod Steiger read extensively about Fields in preparation for the role, and developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of his career and personal life.

Rod Steiger concluded that he would base his characterization around his performance in The Bank Dick.

Rod Steiger played Pontius Pilate in Franco Zeffirelli's TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth.

Stacy Keach, who portrayed Barabbas, expressed his joy at the opportunity to work with Rod Steiger, describing him as "generous and opinionated".

In 1980, Steiger received two Genie Award for Best Performance by a Foreign Actor nominations for his roles in Klondike Fever and The Lucky Star, both Canadian productions.

Later in 1981, Rod Steiger won the Montreal World Film Festival Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of white-bearded Orthodox rabbi Reb Saunders in Jeremy Kagan's The Chosen.

Rod Steiger admitted that during this period he accepted "everything I was offered", and knew that many of the films he appeared in were not great, but wanted to demonstrate his strong work ethic despite his issues.

Rod Steiger later regretted the poorer films in which he appeared during the 1980s, and wished he had done more stage work.

Rod Steiger sank into an even deeper depression when he was not involved in acting, but it bothered him more that his acting career had taken a turn for the worse and was no longer challenging.

In 1984, Rod Steiger starred as a detective assigned to investigate the murder of a Chicago psychoanalyst, a man whom he detests from a previous case, in Bryan Forbes's The Naked Face.

Rod Steiger took a break from cinema in the mid-1980s, during which he appeared in the Yorkshire Television mini-series The Glory Boys with Anthony Perkins, and Hollywood Wives with Angie Dickinson.

Rod Steiger performed on Joni Mitchell's 1985 album Dog Eat Dog, where he provided the voice of an evangelist in the song "Tax Free".

In 1990, Rod Steiger starred in Men of Respect, a crime drama film adaptation of William Shakespeare's play Macbeth.

Rod Steiger played a character based on King Duncan, opposite John Turturro as Mike Battaglia, who plays a Mafia hitman who climbs his way to the top by killing Steiger's character.

Rod Steiger played another mobster, Sam Giancana, two years later in the miniseries Sinatra.

Rod Steiger auditioned for the part of an elderly Irishman in Ron Howard's Far and Away, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

Rod Steiger, who had long been bald, was ordered by Howard to wear a wig to the audition.

Rod Steiger resented the fact that Howard insisted on taping the audition, which he believed to be a form of humiliation for actors, serving as after-dinner entertainment for the Hollywood executives.

Rod Steiger never forgave Howard, whom he referred to as a "cocksucker", for rejecting him for the part and giving it to Cyril Cusack.

In 1993, Rod Steiger portrayed an aging gynaecologist who terrorizes his urban neighbors in a rural community in Burlington, Vermont in The Neighbor.

Rod Steiger reprised the role three years later in the sequel.

Rod Steiger played judges in Antonio Banderas's comedy-drama Crazy in Alabama and in the prison drama, The Hurricane, both in 1999, the latter of which tells the story of former middleweight boxer Rubin Carter, who was wrongly convicted of a triple homicide in a bar in Paterson, New Jersey.

Rod Steiger was married five times: he married actress Sally Gracie, actress Claire Bloom, secretary Sherry Nelson, singer Paula Ellis and actress Joan Benedict Rod Steiger.

Financial considerations led Rod Steiger to sell their New York apartment in the mid-1970s.

Rod Steiger was particularly critical of Charlton Heston's stance on weapons, and publicly referred to him as "America's favorite fascist".

In one clash in a column in the Los Angeles Times, Rod Steiger responded to a letter sent by Heston saying that he was shocked that the American Film Institute had not honored Elia Kazan because of his testimony to the Un-American Activities Committee.

Rod Steiger wrote that he was "appalled, appalled, appalled" at actors and writers who had been forced to drive cabs because they were blacklisted and had even committed suicide as a result.

Rod Steiger described himself as "incapacitated for about eight years with clinical depression" before his Oscar win for In The Heat of the Night.

Rod Steiger underwent open-heart surgery in 1976 and again in 1979 and struggled with obesity, though certain roles, such as Napoleon, required him to intentionally gain weight.

Rod Steiger became increasingly reclusive during this period, often confining himself to his apartment, watching American football for several hours.

Rod Steiger died of pneumonia and kidney failure at the age of 77, as a result of complications from surgery for a gallbladder tumor on July 9,2002, in a Westside hospital in Los Angeles.

Yet for Hutchinson, Rod Steiger remained "out of sympathy with Hollywood" during his career, believing that accomplished actors often struggle to find challenging films as they got older.

Rod Steiger was an "effusive talent" according to Lucia Bozzola of The New York Times, and was particularly noted for his intense portrayal of offbeat, often volatile and crazed characters.

Rod Steiger's acting was so dynamic at times that critics found him excessive and overbearing, and even uncomfortable or laughable to watch.

Kazan felt that Rod Steiger often displayed a competitive edge as an actor and tried to steal scenes from his co-stars.

Rod Steiger rejected these claims, insisting that he was merely "trying to take the medium of acting to as far as I can go, and that why I sometimes go over the edge".

Director Robert Aldrich notes that Rod Steiger had a habit of changing his lines, which often confused his co-stars.

Rod Steiger was particularly aggressive towards director Kenneth Annakin during the making of Across the Bridge, insisting on rewriting most of the script and changing many of the lines to better fit Rod Steiger's idea of the character.