Rod Steiger - Biography, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Filmography (Read)

Rod Steiger - biography, date of birth, place of birth, filmography, clips, actor.
April 14, 1925 - July 9, 2002 - American actor.
He participated in World War II: as a first class torpedo operator, he took part in the most dangerous military operations of the Third and Fifth US fleets, including the Iwo Jima and Okinawa campaigns. The day after Japan's surrender, Steiger left the naval service with a medical report of an acute skin disease. After the war, at the age of 22, he decides to link his fate with the art world. He enters an amateur theater troupe. He played King Menelaus in the play "Helena's Husband" and the role of the villain in the play called "Damn it, Jack Dalton" .
Debuts as an actor in the theater went unnoticed, but they prompted a novice artist that for true success, in addition to abilities, good professional training is also needed. Steiger moved to New York, where he studied acting for two years, first at the New School for Social Research, then Daniel Mann invites him to the famous New York Actors Studio, which was directed by Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg.
In April 1951, Rod Steiger made his Broadway debut in a revived production of Clifford Odets' play Night Music. He played a fifty-five-year-old detective and was highly acclaimed by New York critics. The following year, he appears on stage in Hugh Hastings' comedy "Seagulls over Sorrento" and in Ibsen's "Enemy of the People" .
But the main field of his acting activity during these years was on television. Still not yet Hollywood's “emotional villain,” Steiger demonstrates the breadth of his range, from Romeo to Rasputin. For five years, from 1948 to 1953, he played over 250 roles. In 1951 he made his film debut, starring in Fred Zinnemann's Teresa. Already Steiger's next film role prompted critics to speak of him as a phenomenon. For his participation with Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan's film "On the Port" (1954), Steiger was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. But "Oscar" will bypass him for a long time.
In the film, Steiger played the gangster Charlie, who was tasked with sewing on his brother (Marlon Brando) for wanting to betray the gang. After the film's success, Rod's fate was sealed. He turns into a new star for negative roles, and in this image he begins to wander from film to film. The actor's desire to "humanize" his characters, the desire to show them as not one-sided primitive villains led to the fact that often it was his negative characters that aroused more sympathy in the audience than the faceless positive characters opposing them. Steiger's role as a cinematic villain in the 1950s naturally determines director Richard Wilson's choice of the lead role in Al Capone (1959). In addition, Wilson found a purely superficial similarity between the actor and the famous gangster. The film was a huge success. However, while Al Capone further cemented Steiger's success as an actor, he himself was not happy with his career. Moreover, it was precisely the fear of finally "getting bogged down" in the roles of villains that prompted Rod to a desperate decision: to convince the directors to try him in a different role, to prove to himself and to the audience that his creative range is wider than the proposed roles. In Hollywood, Steiger failed to break the prevailing stereotype, and then he decides to take a step that many considered "madness": at the zenith of fame, he leaves America and goes to Europe, In the early 1960s, Steiger worked in Italy. He starred in the films Hands Over the City (dir. Francesco Rosi, 1963), Indifferent (dir. F. Mazelli, 1964) and others
In 1965, Steiger was invited to star in the film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's satirical story "Unforgettable" by the English director Tony Richardson. The next year, 1966, the actor spent in Spain, and then starred with the Italian director Pasquale Festa Campanile, in the tragicomedy about the times of the First World War "The Girl and the General" .
For four years of work outside Hollywood, Steiger completely freed himself from the role imposed on him, and when he again received an invitation to return to America, now he himself was able to dictate conditions. The actor had to leave for his homeland to recognize him as one of the most talented and gifted people. Having proved himself to be a brilliant master of reincarnation and having proved that he is an actor without a role, or rather, an "actor for any role", Steiger is nevertheless quite constant in his affections. He loved to portray people in critical situations when maximum concentration of forces is required, and life itself makes the hero choose a certain position. Such is the policeman Gillespie (the role for which the actor received an "Oscar") - the hero of the film "Stuffy Night" (dir. N. Juison, 1967); such are Napoleon Bonaparte (Waterloo, directed by S. Bondarchuk, 1970), Benito Mussolini (Benito Mussolini: The Last Act, directed by Carlo Lizani, 1974); Pontius Pilate ("Jesus of Nazareth" by Franco Zeffirelli, 1977), General Webster ("Steiner - Iron Cross 2", directed by E. McLaglen, 1979) and many, many others of his characters.
Rod Steiger died in Los Angeles of pneumonia and complications from gallbladder surgery.

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Author: Jane Watson