Veteran screen actor Rod Steiger, who won an Academy Award for his role as a bigoted small-town police chief opposite Sidney Poitier in the 1967 film In the Heat of the Night, died yesterday. He was 77.
Steiger, who brought a burly, explosive power to a wide range of roles during a 50-year career - from Marlon Brando's racketeer brother in On the Waterfront to a Jewish shopkeeper in Harlem in The Pawnbroker - died of pneumonia and kidney failure, publicist Lori DeWaal said.
He earned Oscar nominations for On the Waterfront (1954) and The Pawnbroker (1964).
Other memorable roles included the lovelorn lout Jud in Oklahoma! (1955) and the bad guy in Doctor Zhivago (1965), as well as a lengthy roster of real-life historical figures, among them Rasputin, Pontius Pilate, Rudolf Hess, Ulysses S. Grant, Benito Mussolini, Al Capone and W.C. Fields.
Along the way, he worked with legendary writers and directors such as Norman Jewison, John Frankenheimer, Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, Sidney Lumet and Tim Burton.
Besides Poitier and Brando, the actor shared the screen with such Hollywood giants as Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, Sylvester Stallone and Jack Nicholson. Indeed, with more than 100 film and TV roles to his credit, Steiger was widely regarded as one the best-connected and versatile performers in Hollywood.
Steiger, who battled severe depression for nearly a decade starting in the early 1980s before embarking on a late-career comeback, said in a 1998 interview that his dream was to "go out in front of the camera".
After growing up mostly in the eastern US state of New Jersey, a young Steiger left high school to join the navy during the second World War after lying about his age. He spent four years in the Pacific, fighting in campaigns at Iwo Jima and Okinawa in Japan, a period of his life that left a deep impression on him.
After the war, Steiger went to study at the New York Theater workshop.