STEIGER, Rodney Stephen ("Rod")

(b. 14 April 1925 in Westhampton, New York; d. 9 July 2002 in Los Angeles, California), actor whose notable motion-picture performancesduring the 1960s included In the Heat of the Night, for which he won the Academy Award in 1968.

Steiger, who was known professionally as Rod Steiger, was the son of Frederick Steiger and Lorraine Driver, both of whom were entertainers. His home life was not a happy one, and often he had to slip away from school to retrieve his mother, an alcoholic, from the local saloon. This experience contributed to a toughness of attitude that, combined with his physical strength, gained him the nickname "Rodney the Rock" from his classmates. After attending various public schools in Irvington, Bloomfield, and Newark, New Jersey, Steiger dropped out of high school to join the U.S. Navy in 1941. He served in the Pacific, and after his discharge in 1945, he worked briefly at a Veteran's Administration office.

Living in New York City during the mid-to late 1940s, Steiger became interested in acting, which he studied for two years at the New School for Social Research. In the course of his study, which took him also to the Dramatic Workshop and the Actors Studio, he became intrigued with a revolutionary concept known as the Stanislavski Method.

Named after Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski, "the Method," as it came to be called, represented a complete reversal of the ideas that had virtually dominated the stage since the time of the Greeks. Hitherto, it had been understood that an actor was simply playing a role, and that there could be no confusing the performer with the character being portrayed. As a result, acting tended to be, quite literally, theatrical, involving a great deal of shouting, dramatics, and gesturing very different from the behavior of real humans. By contrast, the Method dictated that an actor personalize and individualize a role as much as possible. Ideally, according to Stanislavski and American disciples such as Lee Strasberg, the actor would become the character in a sense. Indeed, the actor served as a sort of cowriter for his or her role, seeking to find nuances that, while true to the character, went beyond what the playwright or screenwriter had envisioned.

Of all the American actors to emerge in the postwar years, no two names are more closely associated with the Method than those of Steiger and Marlon Brando, who portrayed brothers in On the Waterfront (1954). His role in the film, only his third, earned Steiger an Academy Award nomination. Other notable examples among Steiger's dozen or so films from the 1950s are Oklahoma! (1955) and Al Capone (1959). Reviewing the first of these, many critics faulted Steiger for playing the role of Jud Fry with much more intensity than the part required. The other film, in which he played the title role, illustrated a facility for playing famous men, a talent Steiger put to use many times during his career.

Already by 1947, Steiger had made his debut in the newest of all dramatic media, television. The 1950s saw numerous appearances on the small screen, none more notable than his lead in Paddy Chayevsky's Marty (1953), a production that helped to show that television could also serve as a legitimate medium for art. On a personal front, Steiger spent much of the 1950s (1952–1958) married to actress Sally Gracie; then, in 1959, he began a ten-year marriage to actress Claire Bloom, with whom he had his first child, Anna.

Early 1960s movies featuring Steiger included Seven Thieves (1960), The Mark (1960), The World in My Pocket (1960), Thirteen West Street (1961), The Longest Day (1962), Convicts Four (1962), and Hands Across the City (1963). Most notable among these is The Mark, a strikingly modern tale. The story follows a former child molester who has been released from prison and attempts to start a new life, only to find himself hounded by a reporter. One of his few sympathizers is Dr. Edmund McNally, played by Steiger. Reminiscing on the role years later, Steiger observed that "in the fifties, everybody went to a psychiatrist because if you didn't, you'd have nothing to talk about at cocktail parties." Since he, too, had an analyst, Steiger—true to his roots in the Stanislavski Method—spent a great deal of time studying the therapist. Influenced by the image of his apparently overworked analyst, he created a character who chain-smokes, drinks coffee relentlessly, and walks around looking unkempt, with rolled-up sleeves and a five o'clock shadow. His performance was so compelling that the American Psychiatric Association invited him to deliver a lecture.

The mid-1960s saw even more significant performances from Steiger in The Pawnbroker (1964) and Doctor Zhivago (1965), as well as his highly acclaimed portrayal of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (1966) for television. The Pawn-broker, in which Steiger played the lead role of Sol Nazerman, was one of the first major films to explore the effects of the Holocaust on concentration camp survivors. As the title suggests, Nazerman operates a pawnshop, and as he becomes immersed in a new Jewish ghetto—that of New York City—he begins to flash back to his experiences in the Nazi death camps. Steiger's performance earned him an Academy Award nomination, as well as the Berlin Film Festival Bear Award and the British Film Academy BAFTA Award.

Steiger played a supporting role as the lecherous Victor Komarovsky in Doctor Zhivago. He later explained that he had read the novel by Boris Pasternak but was still surprised when director David Lean invited him to play the role, because the cast was composed primarily of British actors. The prospect of performing alongside Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness, and Julie Christie both excited and intimidated him, he said, because audiences tended to assume that an American actor would be unable to hold his own against British performers. "My happiest thing about that picture," he recalled in an interview upon the occasion of the film's re-release on DVD in 1999, "is that I proved that American actors can speak as well [as British actors] and also fit in with an ensemble like that."

One of the remarkable aspects of Steiger's performance in Doctor Zhivago is that he manages to turn Komarovsky, a profiteer who seduces a mother and daughter, into a sympathetic character. Yet Steiger, once again true to the method-acting philosophy of the actor as cowriter, managed to expand on Komarovsky's character. In Steiger's view, Komarovsky was not a louse; he was a man of culture, an art dealer, who starts out simply wanting to sleep with Lara (Christie), but ultimately falls in love with her. In the end, Komarovsky proves his good faith by saving not only her life, but that of the man she loves, Zhivago (Sharif).

From playing a Russian art dealer in Doctor Zhivago, Steiger went on to play a prejudiced southern sheriff in what proved to be his greatest performance of the 1960s, and indeed of his career. When Norman Jewison invited him to play opposite Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night (1967), he characterized Sheriff Bill Gillespie by saying "he chews gum." Steiger's first reaction was to tell Jewison that this was the basest of clichés; but as he settled into the role, he found that the gum chewing provided an extraordinary medium for letting the audience in on Gillespie's thought processes. "If you see the picture," he observed many years later, "when things get exciting, he chews faster. When he gets really shocked, everything stops, including the chewing."

As with earlier Steiger films, In the Heat of the Night confronted social issues with which audiences were not entirely comfortable. The story concerns Virgil Tibbs (Poitier), a Philadelphia homicide detective visiting his mother in rural Sparta, Mississippi. After a wealthy white man is murdered, the local police arrest Tibbs simply because he is a well-spoken black man from out of town, but soon they discover that he is a police officer and release him. The critical plot point occurs when Tibbs's superiors in Philadelphia order him to assist in the investigation, since Gillespie has little experience with homicide cases.

At the time of the film's release, African Americans in the South had only recently gained the right to vote without fearing intimidation; therefore, the racial tension in the film is palpable in a way that it would not have been just a few years later. The change in attitudes is illustrated by the relationship of Gillespie and Tibbs portrayed in an enormously popular television series based on the film that the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) aired from 1988 to 1995. Whereas the latter-day Gillespie and Tibbs (Carroll O'Connor and Howard Rollins) are close friends, the characters in the movie are at best wary allies.

In fact, Steiger and Poitier were close friends off-screen. At a time when racial tensions in the South still ran very high, Steiger later recalled, the actors making the film had reason to fear reprisals. "One of my conditions to [making] that picture," he explained, "was that I had to be next to Sidney all the way in case some fanatic … tried to do anything." To ensure Poitier's safety, Steiger insisted that the door connecting their two hotel suites remain open at night. Illustrative of the racial situation in 1967 is the fact that Poitier was not even nominated for an Academy Award, whereas Steiger won the Oscar, as well as BAFTA, Golden Globe, Laurel, National Society of Film Critics, and New York Film Critics Circle awards.

Three other performances from the late 1960s, all of them lead roles, are also notable. In the thriller No Way to Treat a Lady (1968), Steiger played Christopher Gill, a theatre manager and serial killer pursued by a police detective (George Segal), whose girlfriend (Lee Remick) Gill begins stalking. The Sergeant (1968) is a complex drama in which Steiger's Master Sergeant Albert Callan finds himself deeply attracted to a private, played by John Phillip Law. Though the tale is set in the aftermath of World War II, the anti-Vietnam sentiment is clear. Finally, in The Illustrated Man (1969), Steiger plays a character, known simply as Carl, whose body is covered in tattoos. In the course of his search for the woman who placed the tattoos on him, he discovers that each tattoo contains a story of the future. The film, which seems to have influenced Memento (2001), also starred Bloom.

In the years following the 1960s, Steiger played an almost dizzying array of roles and showed a special penchant for portraying famous men and world leaders. He even played Benito Mussolini twice. Yet he had one major regret: that he had turned down the title role in Patton (1970), which proved to be an enormous success for George C. Scott. (Interestingly, Scott also played Mussolini.) Notable films by Steiger in the period since the 1960s include Lucky Luciano (1975), W. C. Fields and Me (1976), The Amityville Horror (1979), The Chosen (1982), American Gothic (1987), Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1991), The Specialist (1994), Mars Attacks! (1996), and The Hurricane (1999). Divorced from Bloom in 1969, he was married to Sherry Nelson (1973–1979) and then to Paula Ellis (1986–1997), with whom he had a son. On 10 April 1997 Steiger was awarded a star on Hollywood Boulevard. On 10 October 2000 he wed actress Joan Benedict, who survives him. He died on 9 July 2002 after being hospitalized for pneumonia and kidney failure.

In a career that has been a monument to versatility, Steiger embodied the Stanislavski Method in portrayals that run the gamut in terms of characters' nationality and social class. His penchant for exploring roles and accents won him praise and sometimes ridicule, but Steiger continued to explore his seemingly limitless range as an actor. In keeping with his chameleon-like stage persona, his appearance changed over the years and from role to role, but by the late 1990s he had taken on the look of a seasoned veteran, complete with a bald head, piercing eyes, and square jaw. Noted for his pithy wisdom, he shared a number of his sayings in an October 1998 Esquire interview, which included this observation: "Curiosity will lead you to many little deaths and many little happinesses. The day your curiosity dies, your life is over."

The only notable biography of Steiger is Tom Hutchinson, Rod Steiger: Memoirs of a Friendship (1998). Interviews are in the Boston Globe (3 Nov. 1991), Back Stage West (6 Aug. 1998), and Esquire (Oct. 1998). Additionally, profiles of Steiger are in the Washington Times (23 May 1991) and the Christian Science Monitor (2 July 1999). An obituary is in the New York Times (10 July 2002).

Judson Knight