Roy Scheider was the epitome of the solidly talented journeyman actor who lucked onto a handful of career-defining roles. He wasn't a movie star in the sense of having a starkly defined persona that followed him from film to film, other than a sort of grizzled but vulnerable New York toughness. On the other hand, can you think of anyone else in his two most famous roles, as Police Chief Brody in "Jaws" (and "Jaws 2") and Joe Gideon (aka Bob Fosse), the egomaniacal director of "All That Jazz"?
Scheider famously turned down the role in "The Deer Hunter" that eventually went to DeNiro because he wanted to reprise Brody in "Jaws 2," and that implied conservatism may offer one reason why his film career tapered into character parts and B movies as the 1980s deepened into the 1990s. He may not have minded: a youthful boxer (the broken nose came from an early title bout), Scheider's first and lasting love was the New York stage, and he performed Shakespeare and Pinter with equal relish and finesse.
And part of it's just Hollywood luck: What actor wouldn't want to play the lead in William Friedkin's 1977 follow-up to "The Exorcist," a remake of a classic French action film to boot? It's not Scheider's fault that the result was the overblown "Sorceror." And yet he gives a mean, tangy flavor to two key pre-"Jaws" roles, as Jane Fonda's pimp in "Klute" and Gene Hackman's unlucky partner in "The French Connection." Scheider's later roles could be juicy, too: opposite Ann-Margret in the echt-80s suspense twister "52 Pick-Up," an Elmore Leonard adaptation that's sleazy and hugely entertaining and as Dr. Benway in David Cronenberg's adaptation of "Naked Lunch," cackling as he administers the giant centipede meat. He appeared to have refused sunblock his entire life, and in his later roles, Scheider's face had the texture of a well-tanned alligator handbag from which those ever soulful eyes questioned and burned.
He worked up until the end, it looks like; something called "Iron Cross" is in the editing room as we speak. I recently saw "Chicago 10," a puckish documentary opening in Boston Feb. 29 that mixes archival footage of the riots outside the 1968 Democratic Convention with animated recreations of the ensuing trial of "co-conspirators." It's thoroughly engrossing and it wasn't until the end credits that I realized the actor providing the whining, querulous voice of Judge Julius J. Hoffman was Scheider -- proof of a playfulness that surfaced all too rarely in the man's filmography.
Here's Dave Kehr's excellent obit, which ran in the Times, the Globe, and elsewhere this morning.
