Advertisement

Topic: Roy Scheider

Jump to
Latest Headlines Quotes

Roy Scheider News




Wiki

Roy Richard Scheider (November 10, 1932 – February 10, 2008) was an American actor. He was best known for his role as police chief Martin Brody in Jaws, his role as Joe Gideon in All That Jazz, and as detective Buddy 'Cloudy' Russo (A character based on real-life detective Sonny (Salvatore) 'Cloudy' Grosso) in The French Connection. Scheider's final role comes as Joseph in the 2009 thriller Iron Cross.

Scheider was born in Orange, New Jersey, the son of Anna Scheider (née Crosson) 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. 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 in the United States Air Force, he appeared with the New York Shakespeare Festival, and won an Obie Award in 1968. Scheider played running roles on two CBS soap operas, "Love of Life" and "The Secret Storm."

Scheider's first film role was in the 1963 horror film Curse of the Living Corpse. (He was billed as "Roy R. Sheider"). 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, garnered 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", which was actually 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 (as his younger brother) and Laurence Olivier. Scheider reunited with French Connection director William Friedkin in the box-office flop Sorcerer, a remake of the 1953 French film Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear).

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Roy Scheider."