Rod Steiger was an American actor who had an extensive career in film, television, and stage.^[1] He made his stage debut in 1946 with Civic Repertory Theatre's production of the melodrama Curse you, Jack Dalton!.^[2] Four years later, he played onstage in a production of An Enemy of the People at the Music Box Theatre. A small role in Fred Zinnemann's Teresa (1951) marked his film debut.^[3] In 1953, he played the title role in the teleplay "Marty" (two years before the film starring Ernest Borgnine) to critical praise.^[4][5] His breakthrough role came with the crime drama On the Waterfront (1954), which earned him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor nomination,^[6] and subsequent appearance in Fred Zinnemann's musical Oklahoma!.^[7]

Steiger played a crooked promoter who hires a sports journalist in the Mark Robson-directed film noir The Harder They Fall (1956). In the 1957 British thriller Across the Bridge, he portrayed a German con-artist on the run in Mexico.^[8] The following year, he played a psychopathic criminal in Andrew L. Stone's thriller Cry Terror!.^[9] He played New York City and later infamous Chicago gangster Al Capone (1899-1947), in the 1959 Richard Wilson-directed biopic of same name, and was cast in the role of an off-shore naval destroyer commander, amazed and stunned in the memorable experience of observing the massive amphibious beach landings in Normandy, France in the epic war film about the World War II "D-Day" (June 6, 1944), in the docu-drama The Longest Day (1962). He starred as an highly educated blind man traveling West to found a school for the blind in California, in the S-4 / E-28 episode on the long-running Western TV series Wagon Train, "The Saul Bevins Story" (1961). For playing a survivor of the Holocaust in the drama The Pawnbroker (1964), he garnered a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, and nominations for the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award in the same category.^[10] The following year, he was cast in the role of a ruthless Russian Empire politician caught up in the 1917 Russian Revolutions and following Civil War in the epic Doctor Zhivago, which was the biggest box-office success of the 1960s, and was included in AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies.^[11][12] He won an Academy Award, a BAFTA and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for director Norman Jewison's mystery drama In the Heat of the Night (1967), playing a Southern small town police chief coping with an unexpected murder.^[13][14][15] He played a serial killer in the black comedy thriller No Way to Treat a Lady (1968), and ended the decade with the box-office flop Three into Two Won't Go (1969).

During the subsequent 1970s, Steiger starred in foreign productions and independent films in search of more demanding roles. His roles during the period include Waterloo (1970), about the famous 1815 battle ending the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, Duck, You Sucker! (1971), about an Irish IRA revolutionary in Mexico during their 1910-20 revolutionary period, 'Last Days of Mussolini (1975), about the Fascist Italian dictator in World War II, W. C. Fields and Me (1976), Roman Empire governor Pontius Pilate in Jesus of Nazareth (1977 TV miniseries), F.I.S.T. (1978), as a 1930s labor union boss, and The Amityville Horror (1979).^[16] After suffering a heart attack in 1979 and undergoing surgery, his poor health and subsequent unfortunate psychological depression took its toll on Steiger's career, and he was forced to appear in several low-budget B movies. Although he was nominated the following year for the Genie Award for Best Performance by a Foreign Actor for his roles in the Canadian productions Klondike Fever and The Lucky Star in 1980,^[17] and won the Montréal World Film Festival Award for Best Actor the next year for Jeremy Kagan's The Chosen (1981),^[18] his subsequent roles were mainly in low-budget films. Later in the decade, n 1989 he played authority figures in two films—a mayor in The January Man and a judge in Tennessee Waltz.

In 1990, Steiger starred in Men of Respect, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's play Macbeth. Steiger's role in the critically panned thriller film opposite Sylvester Stallone in The Specialist (1994) earned him a nomination for the infamous Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actor.^[19][20] Steiger appeared in both Shiloh (1995) and the sequel, three years later. He reunited with director Norman Jewison on the bio-pic The Hurricane about the controversial middle-wight boxer wrongly convicted of a triple-murder in 1999, starring Denzel Washington, in which he portrayed judge H. Lee Sarokin. He was one of the leads in the drama film The Last Producer (2000), before starring in his final career film, the drama thriller Poolhall Junkies (2002).

• Rod Steiger at IMDb
• Rod Steiger at the Internet Broadway Database
• Rod Steiger at the British Film Institute