page_title: Rod Steiger
section_title: Mainstream film acclaim (1964–1969)
hierarchical_section_title: Rod Steiger / Career / Mainstream film acclaim (1964–1969)
caption_attribution_description: English: Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker from the trailer for the film.
context_page_description: Rodney Stephen Steiger was an American actor, noted for his portrayal of offbeat, often volatile and crazed characters. Cited as "one of Hollywood's most charismatic and dynamic stars," he is closely associated with the art of method acting, embodying the characters he played, which at times led to clashes with directors and co-stars. He starred as Marlon Brando's mobster brother Charley in On the Waterfront, the title character Sol Nazerman in The Pawnbroker, and as police chief Bill Gillespie opposite Sidney Poitier in the film In the Heat of the Night which won him the Academy Award for Best Actor.
  Steiger was born in Westhampton, New York, the son of a vaudevillian. He had a difficult childhood, with an alcoholic mother from whom he ran away at the age of 16. After serving in the South Pacific Theater during World War II, he began his acting career with television roles in 1947, and went on to garner critical acclaim for his portrayal of the title character in the teleplay "Marty". He made his stage debut in 1946, in a production of Curse you, Jack Dalton!
context_section_description: Shortly after Hands over the City, Steiger agreed to appear in another Italian film, Time of Indifference (1964), in which he starred opposite Claudia Cardinale and Shelley Winters. Though Steiger's powerful performance was unaffected, the production was marred by a dispute between director Francesco Maselli and producer Franco Cristaldi, with one wanting it to be a purely political film and the other wanting emphasis on the erotic subplot and his relationship with Cardinale. In Sidney Lumet's gritty drama The Pawnbroker (1964), Steiger played an embittered, emotionally withdrawn survivor of the Holocaust living in New York City. Richard Harland Smith of TCM notes that Steiger's career was waning at the time, and he had to "scramble for paying gigs for a decade" before getting this part. Steiger agreed to a reduced fee of $50,000. He read Edward Lewis Wallant's novel and the script many times to develop an intimate understanding of the character, and insisted on reducing his lines to make his character more realistic and alienated from society. Lumet noted that during the production Steiger had a tendency to be overly dramatic, stating: "Sure, Rod has weaknesses of rhetoric, but you can talk them through with him. I explained that this solitary Jew could not rise to heights of emotion; he had been hammered by life and by people. The faith he had to find was in other people, because God had betrayed him."
  Steiger remarked of the film: "I think my best work is in The Pawnbroker. The last scene, where I find the boy dead on the street. I think that's the highest moment, whatever it may be, with my talent." He drew upon inspiration for this climactic scene, in which he appears to show his frustration through a silent scream, from Picasso's "Guernica", which depicts war-ravaged villagers. Cecil Wilson of the Daily Mail wrote that Steiger's character "seems to encompass all the agony ever inflicted on man". Although the film attracted controversy and was accused of anti-Semitism, Steiger was widely acclaimed for his performance, which garnered him the prize for Best Actor at the Berlin International Film Festival and his second Best Actor nomination at the Oscars. Steiger was so certain that he had produced an Oscar-winning performance that he was shocked when he lost to Lee Marvin.
  In 1965, Steiger played an effeminate embalmer in Tony Richardson's comedy The Loved One, about the funeral business in Los Angeles, based on the 1948 short satirical novel by Evelyn Waugh. His curly-haired appearance in the film was modeled on a bust of Apollo he once saw while meeting Richardson. Steiger offended Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who found his character repellent. His next role, as Komarovsky, a Russian politician and "villainous opportunist" who rapes Julie Christie's character in David Lean's Doctor Zhivago (1965), was one of his favorites. Steiger, one of only two Americans in the cast, was initially apprehensive about working with such great British actors as Ralph Richardson and Alec Guinness, and was pleased when the film was completed that he did not stand out as an American. The film was the biggest international box office draw of the 1960s, grossing $200 million worldwide. It has since been acclaimed as one of the greatest films ever made, and in 1998 was selected as the 39th best American film in the original AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list by the American Film Institute.
  Steiger had intended returning to the stage, and had signed on to play the title character in Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, at the Lincoln Center Repertory Company in April 1967, but the production was cancelled when he became ill. Steiger won the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Chief of Police Bill Gillespie in In the Heat of the Night, opposite Sidney Poitier. He played a Southern police chief searching for a murderer. Prejudiced against blacks, he jumps to the conclusion that the culprit is Virgil Tibbs (Poitier), an African-American man passing through town after visiting his mother, who later turns out to be an experienced homicide detec
caption: Steiger in The Pawnbroker (1964)
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