Rod Steiger

After the war, the G.I. Bill put him in a room on West 81st Street and paid for drama school — which Steiger initially enrolled in mainly because it was full of attractive young women. He discovered, to his own surprise, that he could act. Seriously act. By 1953 he was appearing in more than 250 live television productions, including a teleplay called Marty, which he played as a lonely Bronx butcher searching for love. The performance was his breakthrough. When the film version was made two years later, he refused to sign a long-term studio contract, and Ernest Borgnine got the role instead — and won the Oscar. Steiger never expressed regret, exactly. But he didn't pretend the sting wasn't there either.

His Oscar came eventually, for In the Heat of the Night in 1967. As a Mississippi police chief forced into an uneasy partnership with a Black detective played by Sidney Poitier, Steiger built a character out of prejudice that was somehow never cartoonish — because he found the fear and the wounded pride underneath. The film won Best Picture. Steiger won Best Actor. He accepted it not as a triumphant leading man but as a character actor who had finally been seen for what he was.

Three years before that film, he had played Sol Nazerman in The Pawnbroker — an embittered Holocaust survivor running a shop in Harlem, a man trying to feel nothing because feeling everything had once nearly destroyed him. It earned Steiger the Silver Bear at Berlin. Critics called it the performance of his life. It may also be the one that hurt him most to make.

By the 1980s, heart problems and depression had narrowed his options. He took the work available, including films he had no illusions about. His mother, during the last eleven years of her life, had finally gotten sober through Alcoholics Anonymous. Steiger spoke of it with open pride. "She turned herself around," he said. "She came alive again." There is a sense in which he had been trying, his whole career, to do the same thing — to take a childhood full of shame and embarrassment and transform it into something other people could recognize as true.

He died in Los Angeles in July 2002, at seventy-seven, from complications after surgery. One of his last roles was a judge in The Hurricane, reuniting him with the director Norman Jewison after more than thirty years. He showed up, tied the rope to himself, and did the work.