LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Rod Steiger: New York
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Rod Steiger got his first breaks in 50s New York area television productions. His anti-hero look made him the perfect Marty - a sweet, ordinary guy hiding a deep well of fear and anger. Even an early theatrical like Al Capone looks reminiscent of a tv show from that era, because the cast and crew were all drawn from that milieu.
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Steiger won the 1967 Academy Award for playing a bigoted Mississippi cop opposite Sidney Poitier's black Philadelphia cop in the film In the Heat of the Night. Feisty and sometimes difficult, Steiger was a serious-minded actor in the manner of Marlon Brando and James Dean; like those two, he studied Method acting at the prestigious Actors Studio in New York. Steiger played Brando's brother in On the Waterfront, the man to whom Brando utters the famous line, "I coulda been a contender!" Steiger's other films included Oklahoma! (1955, as the villain Jud Fry), Doctor Zhivago (1965, with Omar Sharif), The Amityville Horror (1979, based on the DeFeo family story) and End of Days (1999, with Arnold Schwarzenegger).
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Raised by his mother and stepfather in a fractious household in Newark, New Jersey, Steiger left home at 15 and lied about his age to join the Navy at 16. During World War II, he served as a torpedo man in the Pacific. After the war, he returned to the East Coast and thanks to the GI Bill studied drama and opera at the New School for Social Research in New York. He was accepted into the Actors Studio, joining a class that included Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden and Kim Stanley.
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Steiger was born on April 1, 1925, in West Hampton, New York, the son of parents who were once a song-and-dance team. His parents divorced when he was an infant, and his mother remarried and moved to New Jersey. To escape from his home, rife with alcoholism and argument, Steiger lied about his age and enlisted in the Navy when he was 16.
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Steiger appeared in over 100 motion pictures. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his portrayal of Sheriff Bill Gillespie in In the Heat of the Night (1967) opposite Sidney Poitier. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for On the Waterfront (1954), in which he played Marlon Brando's character's brother. The most famous scene in the film is when Brando's Terry Malloy tells his brother that he "coulda been a contender". He was nominated again, this time for Best Actor, for the gritty The Pawnbroker (1965), a Sidney Lumet film in which Steiger portrays an emotionally withdrawn Holocaust survivor living in New York City.
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Of French, Scottish and German extraction, Rodney Stephen Steiger was born on April 14 1925 at Westhampton, Long Island. His parents had been a travelling song-and-dance team but divorced before he was a year old. He never knew his father and was brought up by his alcoholic mother in various cities in New Jersey.
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