Roy Richard Scheider was an American actor and amateur boxer. He was best known for his
leading role as Police Chief Martin C. Brody in the first two Jaws movies, choreographer
and film director Joe Gideon in All That Jazz, Detective Buddy "Cloudy" Russo in The French
Connection, NYPD Detective Buddy Manucci in The Seven Ups, and Captain Nathan Bridger
in the science fiction television series seaQuest DSV. Scheider's final performance was posthumously
released in the 2011 thriller Iron Cross. Described by AllMovie as "one of the most
unique and distinguished of all Hollywood actors", Scheider was nominated for two Academy
Awards, a Golden Globe Award and a BAFTA Award.
Early life Scheider was born in Orange, New Jersey, the
son of Anna Scheider and auto mechanic Roy Bernhard Scheider. Scheider's mother was of
Irish Catholic background and his father was German American and Protestant. As a child,
Scheider was an athlete, participating in organized baseball and boxing competitions,
for which he was classed as a welterweight, weighing in at 140 lbs. Scheider competed
in the Golden Gloves. He attended Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, and
was inducted into the school's hall of fame in 1985. He traded his boxing gloves for the
stage, studying drama at both Rutgers University and Franklin and Marshall College, where he
was a member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. After three years as an officer in the United
States Air Force, he appeared with the New York Shakespeare Festival, and won an Obie
Award in 1968. On television, Scheider played running roles on two CBS soap operas, Love
of Life and The Secret Storm, and also played character roles in episodes of Coronet Blue
and N.Y.P.D.. Amateur boxing
Between 1947 and 1953 – and, in one match in 1958 – Scheider boxed as an amateur
based in his hometown in New Jersey. In his first bout, at the 1947 Golden Gloves, he
suffered a broken nose and lost by technical knockout in two rounds to Myron Greenberg.
He went on, however, to post a 14-1 record, reversing the defeat to Greenberg in the process.
Film career Scheider's first film role was in the 1963
horror film The Curse of the Living Corpse.. In 1971, he appeared in two highly popular
movies, Klute and The French Connection; the latter, in which he played a fictionalized
version of New York City detective Sonny Grosso, gained him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting
Actor. His first starring role came in 1973 in The Seven-Ups, a quasi-follow-up to The
French Connection, in which Scheider's character is once again based on Grosso.
Two years later, he portrayed Chief Martin Brody in the Hollywood blockbuster Jaws which
also starred Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss. Scheider's famous movie line, "You're gonna
need a bigger boat", ad-libbed by Scheider, was voted 35th on the American Film Institute's
list of best movie quotes. In 1976, he appeared as secret agent Doc Levy
in Marathon Man, with Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier. Scheider reunited with French Connection
director William Friedkin in Sorcerer, a remake of the 1953 French film Le Salaire de la peur.
He was originally cast in The Deer Hunter, the second movie of a three-movie deal with
Universal Studios. However, despite being under contract, Scheider dropped out two weeks
before the start of filming. Universal offered him the option of reprising his role as Martin
Brody for a Jaws sequel, and would consider his contractual obligations fulfilled if he
accepted. Scheider accepted, and Jaws 2 was released in 1978.
In 1979, he received his second Academy Award nomination, this time as Best Actor in All
That Jazz, in which he played a fictionalized version of the film's director and co-writer
Bob Fosse. In 1983, he starred in Blue Thunder, a John
Badham film about a fictitious technologically advanced prototype attack helicopter which
provided security over the city of Los Angeles during the 1984 Summer Olympic Games. This
was followed by a role as Dr. Heywood Floyd in Peter Hyams' 2010, a 1984 sequel to Stanley
Kubrick's 1968 science fiction classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which William Sylvester
originated the role of Floyd. One of his later parts was that of Dr. Benway
in the long-in-production 1991 film adaptation of William S. Burroughs' novel Naked Lunch.
In 1990 he co-starred with Sean Connery in The Russia House as the smart-talking CIA
liaison with MI6. Scheider played a mob boss in the Gary Oldman crime film Romeo Is Bleeding
and a chief executive of a corrupt insurance company cross-examined by Matt Damon's character
in 1997's John Grisham's The Rainmaker, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
Among his later films, he appeared as the crusty father of hero Frank Castle in The
Punisher, and in 2007, starred in The Poet and If I Didn't Care. When Scheider died in
February 2008, he had two movies upcoming: Dark Honeymoon, which had been completed,
and the thriller Iron Cross. In Iron Cross, Scheider plays the leading role of Joseph,
a holocaust survivor with a propensity for justice, which was inspired by director Joshua
Newton’s late father Bruno Newton. Iron Cross was ultimately released in 2011.
Other work Scheider was lead star in the Steven Spielberg-produced
television series SeaQuest DSV as Captain Nathan Bridger. During the second season,
Scheider voiced disdain for the direction in which the series was heading. His comments
were highly publicized, and the media criticized him for panning his own show. NBC made additional
casting and writing changes in the third season, and Scheider decided to leave the show. His
contract, however, required that he make several guest appearances that season. He also repeatedly
guest-starred on the NBC television series Third Watch as fictional character Fyodor
Chevchenko. Scheider hosted an episode of Saturday Night
Live in the tenth season and appeared on the Family Guy episode "Bill & Peter's Bogus Journey",
voicing himself as the host of a toilet-training video; portions of which were censored on
FOX and syndicated broadcast. Scheider provided voiceover on the Family Guy episode "Three
Kings" which also featured his Jaws co-star Richard Dreyfuss. Scheider guest-starred in
the Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode "Endgame" as serial killer Mark Ford Brady, who is identified
at the episode's end as being the biological father of series star Vincent D'Onofrio's,
character, Detective Goren. Scheider narrated and was associate producer
of the 2006 Jaws documentary The Shark is Still Working.
In 2007, Scheider received one of two annually-presented Lifetime Achievement Awards at the SunDeis
Film Festival in Waltham, Massachusetts. Personal life
Scheider's first marriage was to Cynthia Bebout on November 8, 1962. The couple had one daughter,
Maximillia, before divorcing in 1986. On February 11, 1989, he married actress Brenda King,
with whom he had a son, Christian Scheider, and adopted a daughter, Molly. They remained
married until his death. Death
In 2004, Scheider was found to have multiple myeloma, and he received a bone marrow transplant
to treat the cancer in June 2005. He died on February 10, 2008, in Little Rock, Arkansas,
at the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences Hospital.
Filmography
References
External links Roy Scheider at the Internet Movie Database
Obituary in The Times William Friedkin on Roy Scheider
Roy Scheider at Find a Grave