In the summer of 1974, on the waters of Martha’s Vineyard, a 26-year-old director watched his mechanical shark sink, seize up, and refuse to work for the third time that week. The production was hemorrhaging money, and Universal executives circled as the man cast as the terrified police chief of a fictional beach town found himself in a situation not unlike his character’s. That man was Roy Scheider, a stage-trained actor with a boxer’s broken nose and a face built for quiet alarm. What happened next would birth the modern blockbuster and make him a household name, but it would also lock him in a shark cage of his own success—a cage he spent the rest of his life trying to escape.
Roy Richard Scheider was born on November 10, 1932, in Orange, New Jersey, the son of Anna Crosson, an Irish Catholic, and Roy Bernard Scheider, a German Protestant auto mechanic. It was a household shaped by the particular frictions of mixed faith and mid-century suburban America. By his own account, he was a sickly child, plagued by rheumatic fever from the age of six, spending weeks immobilized while other kids ran wild. From age eight, he worked weekends pumping gas at his father’s service station, a job he loathed.
“It’s true that I had more pocket money than my friends but I also had more responsibilities,” he said in a 1975 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “I was driving cars around that place when I was 11 but what I really wanted to do was go swimming with the other kids. ”
The illness and isolation bred a restlessness that found its outlet in boxing. By his late teens, Scheider took up boxing at the local YMCA, less out of aggression than a desperate desire to reshape himself.
Under the guidance of a retired welterweight named Georgie Ward, he trained down to 140 pounds and entered the New Jersey Diamond Gloves tournament. In 1946, a kid named Myron Greenberg broke his nose and stopped him in two rounds by technical knockout. The nose healed crooked and would never be straight again, becoming a signature that made his face read as one that had endured something. Scheider later reversed the loss to Greenberg, building an amateur record of 11 wins against a single defeat.
He attended Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, graduating in 1950, then went to Franklin and Marshall College as a pre-law student. The pivot came in a campus theater when he tried out for Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. “I played an 80-year-old senator in that,” he later recalled. “I liked the atmosphere.
I liked being there at night. I found a home. Everything in my life changed. ” He served in the United States Air Force from approximately 1955 to 1958, rising to the rank of first lieutenant in air operations.
After his discharge, he set out for New York with the conviction of a man who had finally stopped pretending. The 1960s were lean yet formative. Scheider’s professional debut came in 1961, playing Mercutio in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of Romeo and Juliet under Joseph Papp. He spent the decade grinding through off-Broadway repertory, appeared in soap operas, and made his film debut in 1964 in The Curse of the Living Corpse.
In 1965, he appeared in a Lincoln Center production directed by Harold Clurman, a friendship that anchored him in the serious craft tradition of American stage acting. He won an Obie Award in 1968 for his performance in Stephen D. In 1971, everything changed. Scheider appeared in two films that announced him to the world.
The first was Klute, Alan Pakula’s paranoid thriller, in which Scheider played a menacing pimp. The second, which shattered the ceiling permanently, was The French Connection. William Friedkin, the young director who would become one of Scheider’s most important creative partnerships, recalled the simplicity of the casting. “Within 5 minutes, I knew he was the guy,” Friedkin told Entertainment Weekly years later.
Scheider played Detective Buddy Russo, the steadier half of the partnership to Gene Hackman’s manic Popeye Doyle. He borrowed wardrobe details from the real detective Sonny Grosso, on whom his character was based, wearing Grosso’s own watch and wedding ring. The performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He did not win, but the industry had noticed.
What followed was one of the great runs of 1970s American cinema. In 1973 came The Seven-Ups, a New York crime thriller with Scheider now carrying the picture himself. The true transformation was coming. Steven Spielberg, all of 26 years old, called Scheider after seeing The French Connection, wanting a city type for the role of police chief Martin Brody in his adaptation of Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel about a great white shark.
The location shoot on Martha’s Vineyard was scheduled for 55 days. It lasted 159. The mechanical shark, nicknamed Bruce, malfunctioned constantly, and the budget ballooned from $4 million to $9 million. “The threat,” Scheider recalled, “was that he was going to have his picture taken away from him.
” What Scheider understood was that the shark’s failure was the film’s salvation. “Well, a very fortuitous thing happened on that film. The shark didn’t work,” he said. “And that left us with weeks and weeks and weeks to shoot, polish, to improvise, to discuss, to enrich, to develop, to experiment with all the other scenes.
”
The three leads—Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw—began to function like a small repertory company, deepening their characters in ways the original screenplay had never imagined. The great USS Indianapolis monologue was a late addition, shaped by contributions from multiple writers and performers, including John Milius, Carl Gottlieb, and Shaw himself. Scheider’s own contribution, he noted, was a small but telling detail: “My line was the doll-like eyes. ”
Spielberg directed Scheider with deliberate restraint.
“Just Mr. Humble all the time” was how Scheider described the instruction. Roy played it without bravado, and that is precisely why it still works half a century later. The performance is one of understatement in a film of overwhelming spectacle.
And then there is the line, “You’re going to need a bigger boat,” one of the most quoted sentences in cinema history. When an interviewer told Scheider that screenwriter Carl Gottlieb claimed it was improvised, Scheider paused. “That was in the script,” he said. Then after a beat, “I don’t know if I did it or not.
I might have. I’d have to check the original script. It seems so long ago now. ”
Jaws opened on June 20, 1975, becoming the highest-grossing film in history at that time and the template for the summer blockbuster model.
Scheider later lamented that the role would be on his tombstone. The irony was not lost on him: a classically trained stage actor would be remembered forever for running from a barely functional mechanical fish. The years immediately after Jaws were both fruitful and fraught. In 1976, Scheider appeared in Marathon Man as Doc Levy, giving him the chance to work opposite Laurence Olivier.
Then came Sorcerer, Friedkin’s 1977 adaptation of The Wages of Fear. The shoot, primarily in the Dominican Republic, was grueling beyond anything any of them had anticipated. The famous bridge sequence alone took months to complete and cost approximately $3 million. “Roy was not easy to work with on Sorcerer,” Friedkin later acknowledged, describing Scheider as a creature of mood.
Sorcerer opened in the summer of 1977, with anticipation that it would be the standout summer hit. Instead, it was crushed at the box office by George Lucas’s Star Wars. Time has rehabilitated Sorcerer into something close to a masterpiece—Quentin Tarantino called the bridge sequence one of the great suspense moments in cinema, and Stephen King named it his favorite film. But at the time, it was a catastrophe.
And for Scheider, it fed directly into the most consequential mistake of his career. Before Sorcerer, Scheider had been attached to the lead role in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter. He dropped out approximately two weeks before filming began. The role went to Robert De Niro.
The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Contractually obligated and in no position to negotiate, Scheider was offered a blunt deal: reprise the role of Chief Brody in Jaws 2, and Universal would consider his three-picture obligations fulfilled. He took it—he had no real choice. He would eventually call his departure from The Deer Hunter the career decision he most regretted.
What saved him, and what remains perhaps his finest two hours on screen, was Bob Fosse. All That Jazz, Fosse’s semi-autobiographical musical about a self-destructive director-choreographer named Joe Gideon, arrived in 1979 like nothing else in American cinema. Richard Dreyfuss had originally been cast in the lead but dropped out. Scheider fought for the role precisely because it was so far outside his established range.
A man known for cops and tough guys was asking to sing, dance, and embody the manic, pill-popping genius of Bob Fosse himself. What Scheider delivered was extraordinary. “That will always be my favorite film,” he told the San Jose Mercury News in 1999. “But I never worked harder in my life.
I felt I had to prove myself to the dance company. I didn’t want to misrepresent them. ” Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker, offered a penetrating assessment: “Scheider made you feel you were watching Fosse himself. It wasn’t an impersonation.
It was as if Fosse had taken over his body from the inside. ” William Friedkin simply called it one of the finest performances by an American actor in a movie. The performance earned Scheider a nomination for Best Actor at the 52nd Academy Awards, along with a Golden Globe and BAFTA nomination. He lost the Oscar to Dustin Hoffman for Kramer vs.
Kramer. He never won an Academy Award. All That Jazz won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1980, Scheider returned to Broadway in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal.
His first marriage to Cynthia Bebout ended in divorce in 1986. On February 11, 1989, he married Brenda Siemer, a documentary filmmaker and actress. Together they had a son, Christian, and adopted a daughter, Molly. The second marriage was a stabilizing force as his career began its slow, uneven descent.
The 1980s produced flashes of the old power—Blue Thunder in 1983 and 2010: The Year We Make Contact in 1984. The Guardian in its later obituary observed that his gifts were less well exploited from the ’90s onward. It was a harsh verdict, but not an inaccurate one. He remained a working actor throughout, appearing in The Russia House in 1990, David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch in 1991, Romeo Is Bleeding in 1993, and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rainmaker in 1997.
The most turbulent chapter of his later career was SeaQuest DSV. In 1993, Scheider signed on to play Captain Nathan Bridger in Steven Spielberg’s science fiction television series about a futuristic submarine. The show’s first season aspired to genuine seriousness. Then the network demanded the show skew younger, broader, louder.
Scheider responded with a candor that was almost suicidal in network television. “It’s total, total childish trash,” he said. “I’m ashamed of it. ” He reported developing ulcers from the stress.
Scheider departed after the second season. His late co-star, Jonathan Brandis, would die by his own hand in 2003. In the late 1990s and 2000s, Scheider settled into a quieter rhythm of life in Sag Harbor on Long Island. He became increasingly engaged in political activism.
In 2003, he was among demonstrators who lay down on a Long Island highway in an act of civil disobedience against the Iraq war. In a 2004 interview with journalist Steve Matteo, he was blunt about the post-September 11 political climate: “They have sold the American people a bill of goods labeled fear. ” He helped found the Hayground School in Bridgehampton. He played the president of the United States three separate times in direct-to-video thrillers.
He took a memorable guest role on Law & Order: Criminal Intent as a serial killer revealed to be the biological father of Detective Goren. In August of 2006, private tragedy struck. Maximilia, Scheider’s daughter from his first marriage, died of leukemia at the age of 43. By that time, Scheider was already fighting his own battle.
He had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma at the end of 2004 and underwent a bone marrow transplant in June 2005. He went on the Today show and spoke about his condition with the same directness he brought to everything else. “Every single day,” he said, “it’s a miracle. ”
In March 2007, he received a lifetime achievement award at the Sundance Film Festival at Brandeis University following a screening of All That Jazz.
At the time of his death, he was involved in a project to build a film studio in Florence, Italy. Roy Scheider died on the afternoon of February 10, 2008, in Little Rock, Arkansas, of complications from a staff infection. He was 75 years old. He appeared in three films selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry: The French Connection, Jaws, and All That Jazz.
Friedkin called him one of the most underappreciated actors of his generation. He did not grandstand. He did not mythologize himself.
He showed up, prepared, did the work, and went home to Sag Harbor.