Rod Steiger

Rodney Stephen Steiger ( ; April 14, 1925 – July 9, 2002) was an American actor, noted for his portrayal of offbeat, often volatile and crazed characters. Ranked 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. In films, he starred as Marlon Brando's mobster brother, Charley, in On the Waterfront; the title character, Sol Nazerman, in The Pawnbroker (1964), which won him the Silver Bear for Best Actor; and as police chief Bill Gillespie, opposite Sidney Poitier, in the film In the Heat of the Night (1967), 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, running away from home to escape an alcoholic mother at the age of 16. After serving in the South Pacific 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 main character in the teleplay "Marty" (1953). He made his stage debut in 1946, in a production of Curse You, Jack Dalton! at the Civic Repertory Theatre of Newark, and subsequently appeared in productions such as An Enemy of the People (1950), Clifford Odets's Night Music (1951), Seagulls Over Sorrento (1952), and Rashomon (1959).

Steiger made his film debut in Fred Zinnemann's Teresa in 1951, and subsequently appeared in films such as The Big Knife (1955), Oklahoma! (1955), Jubal (1956), Across the Bridge (1957), and Al Capone (1959). After his performance in The Pawnbroker in 1964, in which he played an embittered Jewish Holocaust survivor working as a pawnbroker in New York City, he portrayed an opportunistic Russian politician in David Lean's Doctor Zhivago (1965). In the Heat of the Night (1967) won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Steiger, who was lauded for his performance as a Mississippi police chief who learns to respect an African-American officer (Poitier) as they search for a killer. The following year, he played a serial killer of many guises in No Way to Treat a Lady.

During the 1970s, Steiger increasingly turned to European productions in his search for more demanding roles. He portrayed Napoleon Bonaparte in Waterloo (1970), a Mexican bandit in Sergio Leone's Duck, You Sucker! (1971), Benito Mussolini in Last Days of Mussolini (1975), and ended the decade playing a disturbed priest in The Amityville Horror (1979). By the 1980s, heart problems and depression took their toll on Steiger's career, and he found it difficult to find employment, agreeing to appear in low-budget B movies. One of his final roles was as judge H. Lee Sarokin in the prison drama The Hurricane (1999), which reunited him with In the Heat of the Night director Norman Jewison. Steiger was married five times, and had a daughter, opera singer Anna Steiger, and a son, Michael Steiger. He died of pneumonia and kidney failure as a result of complications from surgery for a gallbladder tumor in 2002, aged 77, in Los Angeles. His fifth wife was Joan Benedict Steiger.

Early life and acting background Steiger attended West Side High School in Newark, New Jersey, where he showed an early interest in acting. Steiger was born on April 14, 1925, in Westhampton, New York, the only child of Lorraine (née Driver) and Frederick Steiger, of French, Scottish, and German descent. Rod was raised as a Lutheran. He never knew his father, a vaudevillian who had been part of a travelling song-and-dance team with Steiger's mother, As a result, she quit show business and moved away from Westhampton to raise her son. They moved through several towns in New Jersey, including Irvington and Bloomfield, before settling in Newark. Her alcoholism caused Steiger much embarrassment, and the family was frequently mocked by other children and their parents within the community. At the age of five he was sexually abused by a pedophile who lured him in with a butterfly collection. Steiger said of his troubled family background: "If you had the choice of having the childhood you experienced, with your alcoholic mother and being the famous actor you are today, or having a loving, secure childhood and not being famous, which would you take? A loving, secure childhood in a New York minute". During the last 11 years of her life, Steiger's mother stayed sober and regularly attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Steiger recalled: "I was so proud of her. She turned herself around. She came alive again".

During his childhood, and owing to his considerable strength and bulk, Steiger became known as "The Rock". Despite being mocked over his mother's alcoholism, he was a popular figure at school and an able softball player. He displayed an interest in writing poetry and acting during his adolescent years, and appeared in several school plays while at West Side High School in Newark. Tired of fighting with his mother, he ran away from home at age sixteen to join the United States Navy during World War II.

In a 1999 interview with BBC News, Steiger said he probably would not have done On the Waterfront if he'd known at the time that Kazan had provided the House Un-American Activities Committee with names of performers suspected of being Communists.

Steiger played Jud Fry in the film version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! (1955), in which he performed his own singing. It was one of the biggest location film productions of the 1950s, shot near Nogales, Arizona, with a crew of 325 people and some 70 trucks. Steiger portrayed a disturbed, emotionally isolated version of Jud, which television channel Turner Classic Movies (TCM) believed brought a "complexity to the character that went far beyond the stock musical villain". During the production of Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow, in which he played a Confederate army veteran who refuses to accept defeat following the surrender of General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox at the end of the American Civil War, Steiger badly sprained his ankle before shooting one of the battle scenes and was unable to walk, let alone run. Fuller instead got one of the Native American extras to run in Steiger's place, which is why the scene was shot showing only the feet, instead of using close-ups. Steiger had researched the history behind the film and decided to play the character as an Irishman, becoming "the first Irish cowboy" as he put it. Later that year, Steiger took the lead role in the British thriller Across the Bridge, in which he played a German conman with British citizenship who goes into hiding in Mexico after embezzling company funds. Film critic Dennis Schwartz stated that Steiger gave "one of his greatest performances".

Steiger portrayed a mastermind criminal seeking to obtain a $500,000 ransom, opposite James Mason and Inger Stevens, in Andrew L. Stone's Cry Terror! (1958) for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Paul Beckley of the Herald Tribune had thought Steiger "superbly laconic", but Dennis Schwartz dismissed the film as "an ill-conceived attempt" with "too many coincidences and contrived plot points to sustain interest". The following year, Steiger appeared with Claire Bloom (whom he later married) in a Fay and Michael Kanin stage production of Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film, Rashomon, where he enacted the role of the bandit originally played by Toshiro Mifune. A major success, it was lauded by critics and nominated for three Tony Awards. Robert Coleman of the Daily Mirror described Steiger's performance as "magnificently animalish", while Kenneth Tynan of The New Yorker thought the acting helped set new standards for Broadway. The same year, Steiger portrayed iconic mobster Al Capone in the film of the same name. Steiger was particularly keen on demonstrating the showiness of Capone, speaking thunderously, slinging a camel-hair coat over his shoulders and wearing his hat at a jaunty angle. The film, noted for its deglamorized portrayal of the subject, earned Steiger a Laurel Award for Best Male Dramatic Performance nomination. Although Hutchinson, author of Rod Steiger: Memoirs of a Friendship, perceived Steiger's portrayal of Capone to be more of a caricature, George Anastasia and Glen Macnow, authors of the book The Ultimate Book of Gangster Movies, described it as one of the best screen portrayals of Capone.

Following the success of Al Capone, Steiger played sophisticated thief Paul Mason, who masterminds a caper to steal $4 million in French francs from the underground vault of the casino of Monte Carlo, in the Henry Hathaway heist film Seven Thieves (1960). Bosley Crowther of The New York Times gave a positive review of the film, praising the "nerve-rackingly delicate plot" and the "most elaborate roles" of Steiger and his co-star, Edward G. Robinson. The following year, he took the part of a prison psychiatrist who tries to cure the psychological demons of Stuart Whitman's character in The Mark. Steiger's performance was so convincing that, after the film was released, he received a call from a psychiatric institution asking him to attend one of their board meetings. The Mark was followed by a role in the European film production of World in My Pocket alongside Nadja Tiller. Steiger increasingly played in films in Italy and France during this period. Not only did he believe he had greater credibility and esteem as an actor in Europe, but he approved of the more relaxed filming schedule prevalent there at that time.

In 1962, Steiger appeared on Broadway in Moby Dick—Rehearsed, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, as well as playing a detective searching for a scientist's (Alan Ladd) mugger in Philip Leacock's 13 West Street for Columbia Pictures. Steiger played a small role of a destroyer commander among the large ensemble cast of The Longest Day, which included John Wayne, Richard Todd, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Sean Connery, and Henry Fonda. According to co-star Richard Burton, Steiger had privately admitted to him that he was in financial trouble at the time and had a face lift, which Burton thought made him look like "one half of a naked ass-hole". The following year, Steiger played ruthless Neapolitan land developer and city councilman Edoardo Nottola, who uses his political power to make personal profit in a large scale suburban real estate deal, in Francesco Rosi's Italian drama film Hands over the City (1963). According to biographer Francesco Bolzoni, Rosi had cast Steiger in the Italian-language film because he had wanted "a rich interpreter of great capacity" in the part of the land developer.

Mainstream film acclaim (1964–1969) quote=Well they never went away. 'The Pawnbroker', directed by Sidney Lumet, was an independent, so was 'The Sergeant'. They're just coming back stronger because the greed finally ran into a wall, and what proved it was all these small independent films getting nominations and winning awards where all these multi-million dollar films did nothing, and that really shook them up. I would always say the bigger the budget, the less imagination. In the old days, they had designers who, if they had to create a battleship, would get a bit of net and a bit of board and make one. Now there is no imagination. If they want a destroyer now, they ring up the government and get a real one. There aren't any challenges any more; they're home decorators. — — Steiger on appearing in independent films

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." 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. 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.

Sidney Poitier considered Steiger and Spencer Tracy to be the finest actors with whom he ever worked. 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 Theater 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. A stereotypical Southern racist, 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 detective from Philadelphia. The film deals with the way the two men interact and join forces in solving the crime, as Steiger's Gillespie learns to greatly respect the black man he initially took to be a criminal. Steiger drew upon his experience in the Navy with a Southerner named "King", remembering his accent. A. D. Murphy of Variety described Steiger's performance as "outstanding", writing: "Steiger's transformation from a diehard Dixie bigot to a man who learns to respect Poitier stands out in smooth comparison to the wandering solution of the murder." Steiger won a plethora of other awards, including a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, and awards for Best Actor from the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle.

In 1968, Steiger played a serial killer opposite George Segal in Jack Smight's black comedy thriller No Way to Treat a Lady. and a writer for Time Out describing him as "brilliant as a sort of Boston strangler, son of a great actress who has left her boy with a mother fixation".

Later in 1968, Steiger played a repressed gay non-commissioned officer opposite John Phillip Law in John Flynn's The Sergeant for Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, which earned him the David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Actor. Despite the award win, film critic Pauline Kael of The New Yorker was particularly critical of the casting of Steiger as a homosexual and felt that he was "totally outside his range", to which Steiger concurred that he was ineffective.

Steiger was cast as a short-tempered tattooed man with soon-to-be ex-wife Claire Bloom in the science fiction picture The Illustrated Man (1969). The film was a critical and commercial failure, and Ray Bradbury said: "Rod was very good in it, but it wasn't a good film... the script was terrible". Steiger had better luck alongside Bloom later that year in Peter Hall's British drama Three into Two Won't Go, playing an Irishman who cheats on his wife with a young hiker. It was entered into the Berlin International Film Festival and became the 19th most popular film at the UK box office in 1969.

Historical roles and declining fortunes (1970–1981) Steiger was offered the title role in Patton (1970), but turned it down because he did not want to glorify war. The role was then given to George C. Scott, who won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance. Steiger called this refusal his "dumbest career move", remarking, "I got on my high horse. I thought I was a pacifist." Instead, he chose to portray Napoleon Bonaparte opposite Christopher Plummer in Sergei Bondarchuk's Waterloo (1970), a co-production between the Soviet Union and Italy. Anatoly Efros wrote: "I watched with extraordinary respect, no, that is not the right word, with enthusiasm, the acting of Rod Steiger in the role of Napoleon in Waterloo", while literary critic Daniel S. Burt describes Steiger's Napoleon as an "unusual interpretation", finding him less convincing than Plummer's Wellington.

In 1971, Steiger played a chauvinistic big game hunter, explorer and war hero opposite Susannah York in Mark Robson's Happy Birthday, Wanda June, before agreeing to star alongside James Coburn as Mexican bandit Juan Miranda in Sergio Leone's Duck, You Sucker!, which was alternatively titled A Fistful of Dynamite. Leone was initially dissatisfied with his performance in that he played his character as a serious, Zapata-like figure. As a result, tension grew between Steiger and Leone, including one incident that ended with Steiger walking off during the filming of the scene where Juan's stagecoach is destroyed. After the film's completion, Leone and Steiger were content with the final result, and Steiger praised Leone for his skills as a director. Later that year he was cast as the turban-wearing German officer Guenther von Lutz in Duccio Tessari's Italian war comedy The Heroes, opposite Rod Taylor, and appeared as "foul-mouthed Sicilian mobster" Eugenio Giannini opposite Gian Maria Volonté's Lucky Luciano in Francesco Rosi's film of the same name.

In 1975, Steiger portrayed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in Carlo Lizzani's Last Days of Mussolini, which received a positive critical reception. He appeared in Claude Chabrol's French picture Innocents with Dirty Hands, playing the role of Louis Wormser, the wealthy alcoholic husband of Romy Schneider's character Julie Wormser. It was poorly received by critics, and Steiger found the director, whom he had admired, a bitter disappointment. He was highly critical of Chabrol's lack of communication and aloofness from the production, and preference for playing chess on set instead of talking through scenes. Vincent Canby of The New York Times dismissed it as "little more than a soap opera", writing: "The performances are of a piece—uniformly atrocious. Mr. Steiger surpasses his own earlier records for lumbering busyness. Within his first few minutes on screen he (1) gets drunk, (2) whines, (3) pleads for understanding, (4) weeps and (5) goes to bed alone." Later that year, Steiger starred as an Irish Republican Army terrorist who plans to blow up the Houses of Parliament in Don Sharp's British thriller Hennessy. John Simon of New York Magazine wrote: "This fellow Hennessy, as played by Rod Steiger, is about as interesting and likable as a Guy Fawkes dummy."

W. C. Fields: Steiger's portrayal of him was poorly received by critics. The following year, Steiger portrayed the comic actor W. C. Fields in an Arthur Hiller biopic, W. C. Fields and Me, for Universal Pictures. The screenplay, which was based on a memoir by Carlotta Monti, who was Fields' mistress for the last 14 years of his life, was penned by Bob Merrill. Steiger read extensively about Fields in preparation for the role, and developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of his career and personal life. He concluded that he would base his characterization around his performance in The Bank Dick (1940). Lucia Bozzola of The New York Times later referred to Steiger's portrayal of Fields as "superb", but noted that his Hollywood career had "undeniably fallen from his 1950s and '60s heights". The following year, Steiger was cast as a general opposite Richard Burton and Robert Mitchum in Andrew V. McLaglen's war film Breakthrough, set on the Western Front. In The Amityville Horror (1979), Steiger appeared as a disturbed priest, who is invited to perform an exorcism on a haunted house. Again Steiger was accused of overacting; Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote: "Mr. Steiger bellows and weeps and overdoes absolutely everything. He won't even pick up the phone before it's rung 12 or 15 times." Pauline Kael thought that Steiger's "spiritual agony was enough to shatter the camera lens".

Benito Mussolini: Steiger portrayed him for the second time on screen in 1981's Libyan-funded Lion of the Desert. In 1980, Steiger received two Genie Award for Best Performance by a Foreign Actor nominations for his roles in Klondike Fever and The Lucky Star, both Canadian productions. Klondike Fever is based on Jack London's journey from San Francisco to the Klondike gold fields in 1898. Steiger revisited his role as Mussolini in Lion of the Desert, a production that was financed by Muammar Gaddafi, and which co-starred Anthony Quinn as Bedouin tribal leader Omar Mukhtar, fighting the Italian army in the years leading up to World War II. The Italian authorities reportedly banned the film in 1982, as it was considered damaging to the army, and it was not shown on Italian television until a state visit by Gaddafi in 2009. It received critical acclaim in Britain, where it was praised in particular for the quality of its battle scenes. Later in 1981, Steiger won the Montréal World Film Festival Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of white-bearded Orthodox rabbi Reb Saunders in Jeremy Kagan's The Chosen. Janet Maslin commented that Steiger's "slow, rolling delivery" was more "numbing than prepossessing", though a critic from Variety thought it an "exceptional performance as the somewhat tyrannical but loving patriarch".

B-movies and criticism (1982–1994) After his open-heart surgery in 1979, clinical depression and health problems during the 1980s directly affected Steiger's career, and he often turned to B movies, low-budget, independent productions, and TV miniseries. He admitted that during this period he accepted "everything I was offered", and knew that many of the films he appeared in were not great, but wanted to demonstrate his strong work ethic despite his issues. He later regretted the poorer films in which he appeared during the 1980s, and wished he had done more stage work. He sank into an even deeper depression when he was not involved in acting, but it bothered him more that his acting career had taken a turn for the worse and was no longer challenging. The major studio producers were wary of his problems and considered him a liability. Steiger took a break from cinema in the mid-1980s, during which he appeared in the Yorkshire Television mini-series The Glory Boys (1984) with Anthony Perkins, and Hollywood Wives (1985) with Angie Dickinson. Steiger and Perkins were at loggerheads during the production of The Glory Boys. Perkins resented the fact that Steiger insisted on a bigger trailer and felt that Steiger was trying to steal scenes from him, while Steiger had thought Perkins "so jittery and jinxed by the chemicals he was taking" that he felt sorry for him and believed that he was jeopardizing the success of the film. Steiger also performed on Joni Mitchell's 1985 album Dog Eat Dog, where he provided the voice of an evangelist in the song "Tax Free".

Steiger played a villain/antagonist role in the Argentine-American film Catch the Heat (1987), an action/martial arts picture about two undercover agents of the law who fight against an American-Brazilian drug baron who smuggles drugs into the United States inside showgirls' breast implants. According to director Fred Olen Ray, it was pulled from distribution within a week of release. In 1988, Steiger and Yvonne De Carlo played a spooky elderly couple with developmentally delayed children in John Hough's horror film American Gothic. Universally panned by the critics, Caryn James of The New York Times wrote: "Mr. Steiger addresses the camera as if he were reciting Shakespeare, he is truly, straightforwardly, hilariously bad." During the last year of the decade he played authority figures, including a mayor in The January Man, and as Judge Prescott in Tennessee Waltz. Although Steiger admitted that his performance in The January Man was "way over the top", he enjoyed the experience, thereby marking a positive turning point after a period of clinical depression.

In 1990, Steiger starred in Men of Respect, a crime drama film adaptation of William Shakespeare's play Macbeth. He played a character based on King Duncan, opposite John Turturro as Mike Battaglia (Macbeth), who plays a Mafia hitman who climbs his way to the top by killing Steiger's character. The film was critically panned, with Roger Ebert awarding it one star out of four, describing the concept as a "very, very bad idea". Steiger played another mobster, Sam Giancana, two years later in the miniseries Sinatra (1992).

Steiger portrayed a reverend living in a small town in the American South in the macabre Merchant Ivory film production The Ballad of the Sad Café (1991), co-starring Vanessa Redgrave and Keith Carradine. The film met with generally lukewarm reviews, though it was entered into the 41st Berlin International Film Festival. Steiger auditioned for the part of an elderly Irishman in Ron Howard's Far and Away, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Steiger, who had long been bald, was ordered by Howard to wear a wig to the audition. He resented the fact that Howard insisted on taping the audition, which he believed to be a form of humiliation for actors, serving as after-dinner entertainment for the Hollywood executives. Steiger never forgave Howard, whom he referred to as a "cocksucker", for rejecting him for the part and giving it to Cyril Cusack.

In 1993, Steiger portrayed an aging gynaecologist who terrorizes his urban neighbors in a rural community in Burlington, Vermont, in The Neighbor. Dennis Schwartz considered it to have been one of Steiger's creepiest roles, though he thought that the poor script had rendered the role awkward and "mildly entertaining in the sense that Steiger is asked to carry the film and hams it up". The following year, Steiger agreed to play the role of a Cuban mob boss opposite Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone in Luis Llosa's thriller The Specialist, citing its purpose as a "$40 million commercial" to show a new generation that he existed. Critics panned the film, which has a four percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 27 reviews as of July 2015. The role earned Steiger a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actor nomination, and the film was listed in The Official Razzie Movie Guide as one of "The 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made".

Later work and final years (1995–2002)

Following The Specialist (1994), Steiger appeared in Tom Clancy's Op Center (1995), a film that was edited down into a TV miniseries, and featured in a Columbo television film, Strange Bedfellows. The following year, he took a minor role as Doc Wallace in the Dale Rosenbloom family drama Shiloh. He reprised the role three years later in the sequel, Shiloh 2: Shiloh Season. Also in 1996, Steiger played a "jingoistic top general" who "petitions the president to go nuclear in the middle of a global crisis" in the ensemble Tim Burton production of Mars Attacks!.

In 1997, Steiger played Tony Vago, the mob boss of Vincent Gallo's character in Kiefer Sutherland's Truth or Consequences, N.M., a gritty noir about a drug heist gone wrong. Steiger played judges in Antonio Banderas's comedy-drama Crazy in Alabama and in the prison drama, The Hurricane, both in 1999, the latter of which tells the story of former middleweight boxer Rubin Carter, who was wrongly convicted of a triple homicide in a bar in Paterson, New Jersey. The Hurricane reunited Steiger with Norman Jewison, who had directed him in In the Heat of the Night. Steiger portrayed H. Lee Sarokin, the judge responsible for freeing Carter. Sarokin thought it was a "marvellous film" that was Oscar-worthy, but found Steiger's portrayal as overacted and a "little arrogant and pompous".

After a minor role as a "bombastic priest" in End of Days (1999), Steiger's last film role was as the billiard hall manager, Nick, in Poolhall Junkies (2002); it was poorly received by critics.

Personal life

Steiger was married five times: he married actress Sally Gracie (1952–1958), singer Paula Ellis (1986–1997) and actress Joan Benedict Steiger (married 2000 until his death).

Steiger was an outspoken critic of McCarthyism. He later clashed on the subject with Charlton Heston, and referred to Heston as "America's favourite fascist." because he played Doc Wallace in the first two films of the series.

Acting style

Steiger was one of Hollywood's most respected character actors. Hutchinson described him as "one of Hollywood's most charismatic and dynamic stars". Yet for Hutchinson, Steiger remained "out of sympathy with Hollywood" during his career, believing that accomplished actors often struggle to find challenging films as they got older. Steiger was an "effusive talent" according to Lucia Bozzola of The New York Times, Pauline Kael found his performances so powerful that she believed he "often seems to take over a picture even when he isn't in the lead". The journal Films and Filming, surveying his career in 1971, noted that his talent "developed steadily through films good and bad", and that the secret of his success was that he stayed grounded, citing a 1956 interview where he said "I pity the player who can't keep his feet on the ground. It's too easy to trade on success and forget that no performer can stand still."

A product of the Actors Studio, Steiger is closely associated with method acting, embodying the characters he played. Writer James F. Scott notes that during his career, he "many times put aside his own personality to think his way into an alien psyche". Steiger once said:

I don't like the term Method, but for the sake of argument method acting is a means to an end. It is something that helps you get involved in the part personally so that you can communicate with the audience. No matter what, the American actor of the fifties changed acting the world over. Montgomery Clift was perhaps the actor who started it, Brando caused the sensation and [James] Dean made it a cult. Roger Ebert later echoed this statement, concurring that Steiger lacked mannerisms, writing, "When he gets a character worth playing with, he creates it new from the bottom up, out of whole cloth. I don't know how he does it. It's almost as if he gets inside the skin of the guy he's playing and starts being that person for a while". Steiger said: "I always tried to do things different. If I got a role which was similar to another I'd try to do it a little different." His explosive screen performances were an influence on many later actors, including Robert De Niro, who used Steiger's portrayal of Al Capone as a reference for his own performance in The Untouchables (1987). Elvis Presley was highly impressed with Steiger's "powerful and wrenching performance" in The Pawnbroker.

Despite Steiger's acclaim as an actor, he was frequently accused of overacting and won his share of critics, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s. His acting was so dynamic at times that critics found him excessive and overbearing, and even uncomfortable or laughable to watch. Steiger once clashed with Armenian director Rouben Mamoulian, during a theatrical production of Oklahoma!, as he was intolerant of Steiger's "unusual acting technique". Steiger ignored the director's concerns that he was mumbling his lines, and when he began chomping loudly on an apple during a scene with Gordon MacRae, Mamoulian exclaimed: "Get out of my theater. Get out of my life!", and fired him. Even Kazan found several of the Actors Studio's techniques disagreeable, preferring "more humor and verve and less self-indulgence, self-pity and self-awareness". Kazan felt that Steiger often displayed a competitive edge as an actor and tried to steal scenes from his co-stars. Steiger rejected these claims, insisting that he was merely "trying to take the medium of acting to as far as I can go, and that why I sometimes go over the edge".

Several co-stars found working with Steiger difficult; Warren Oates, according to director Norman Jewison, viewed Steiger as "somebody who had a tendency to go over the top" during the making of In The Heat of the Night. Writer Richard Dyer highlights the contrast in the film between the acting styles of Steiger and Poitier, with "Poitier's stillness and implied intensity" and "Steiger's busy, exteriorised method acting". Humphrey Bogart, Steiger's co-star in The Harder They Fall, referred to Steiger's method acting as the "scratch-your-ass-and-mumble school of acting". Director Robert Aldrich notes that Steiger had a habit of changing his lines, which often confused his co-stars. Aldrich stated: "Usually I lie awake at nights trying to think of ways to improve an actor's performance. With Steiger, the problem is to try and contain him". Steiger was particularly aggressive toward director Kenneth Annakin during the making of Across the Bridge, insisting on rewriting most of the script and changing many of the lines to better fit Steiger's idea of the character. Annakin stated that he had "never known an actor to put so much thought and preparation into a performance" as Steiger. Hutchinson revealed that Steiger often suffered from panic during filming and that fear of failure haunted him throughout his life, but fear also provided him with a source of strength in his acting.

Credits and awards