Roy Scheider

Born on November 10, 1932, in Orange, New Jersey, Roy Richard Scheider was the son of a Protestant mechanic from Germany and an Irish Catholic. Although he suffered attacks of rheumatism as a child, as soon as he recovered he became a very sporty boy, constantly participating in baseball and boxing competitions. After graduating from high school he studied drama, at Rutgers University, and at Franklin and Marshall College. After spending three years in the army, in the Air Force, he made his stage debut, in New York’s Off-Broadway. He stayed there for a decade during which he earned great prestige.

Scheider participated in some television series, before making his debut on the big screen, as the protagonist of the horror sub-product The Curse of the Living Corpse . After a brief appearance on Star! , by Robert Wise , gets his first major role in Klute , by Alan J. Pakula , where he was the ‘pimp’ and husband of the prostitute played by Jane Fonda , who helped the detective mentioned in the title ( Donald Sutherland ) to solve a case.

For this film, and thanks in large part to the intense sequences they shot together, Jane Fonda won the Oscar in 1972. Her work was also decisive so that that same year they also gave it to Gene Hackman , her co-star in French Connection (Against the Drug Empire) , by William Friedkin . For that same film, Scheider was also nominated for the coveted statuette, unsuccessfully, for playing detective ‘Cloudi’ Russo, who along with ‘Popeye’ Doyle, the character of Gene Hackman, investigates the activities of a French drug trafficker, played by the Spanish Fernando Rey .

In 1975, Steven Spielberg signed him for his best-known role, police chief Martin Brody, who in Jaws , organizes the hunt for the shark that terrorizes the seaside town of Amity Island. The film was one of the great successes of all time, and that summer no bather went into the water calmly. Scheider was the only actor in this film who reprized his role in Jaws 2 , a much inferior sequel to the original. After Marathon Man , where he was an American secret agent chasing a Nazi criminal, Roy Scheider decided to get rid of the typecasting of a tough guy, and completely changed register in All That Jazz (The show begins) , the musical with autobiographical overtones directed byBob Fosse . For his role as Joe Gideon, a theater manager, he earned another Oscar nomination.

Robert Benton paired Scheider with Meryl Streep in the thriller Under Suspicion (1982) . Right after, the actor found great success with Blue Thunder , where he piloted a sophisticated police helicopter equipped with incredible technological advances to fight crime. He was also the protagonist of 2010, Odyssey 2 , in which he gave life to an astronaut sent to discover what happened to the characters of 2001: A Space Odyssey , although logically it was a mediocre sequel that did not stand up to comparisons with the masterpiece of Kubrick. 52 lives or dies – a thriller by John Frankenheimer , based on a novel byElmore Leonard – marks the beginning of the actor’s decline, who was relegated to films with little commercial impact, such as Cohen and Tate , Listen to Me and The Fourth War . Finally, he became a secondary star, in titles such as Naked Lunch , Russia House , Self-Defense , RKO 281 and The Punisher . On television he was the captain of the futuristic submarine in SeaQuest , a series produced by Spielberg that imitated the scheme of Star Trek , but under the sea, and which lasted three seasons. The actor leaves the B-series thriller pending premiereDark Honeymoon , and shortly before he died filming Iron Cross had finished , where he plays a retired policeman.