Rod Steiger dies

Rod Steiger, the beefy, intense actor who won the Oscar as best actor of 1967 for his role as the unrelenting Southern police chief in In the Heat of the Night, died today. He was 78.

Steiger died at a Los Angeles hospital of pneumonia and kidney failure, said his publicist, Lori De Waal.

A devoted practitioner of method acting, Steiger prided himself in undertaking challenging roles, especially real-life persons.

‘‘My generation of actors was taught to be able to create different people; that’s what an actor is supposed to do,’’ he explained.

In movies and television, he convincingly portrayed such figures as Mussolini, Rasputin, Pope John XXIII, Rudolph Hess, Pontius Pilate, Napoleon, WC Fields and Al Capone.

‘‘I’m 60% virgin and 40% whore,’’ he claimed. ‘‘I’ve not sold out that much, and I’ve made my own mistakes.’’

He admitted that he made a big mistake in declining the lead in Patton, believing the film would glorify war and killing. George C Scott played the role, and it brought him an Academy Award, which he refused.

Steiger had another brush with the Oscar in his early movie career. He had been the leading contender for Marty in the role he had created on television. But the producer, Burt Lancaster, wanted the loveless butcher to be a gentle character, and Steiger didn’t qualify. Ernest Borgnine won the Oscar in the role.

Steiger played his most famous scene with Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront.

As the two brothers ride in the rear of a taxi, Brando castigates Steiger for making him throw a boxing match: ‘‘I coulda had class! I coulda been a contender.’’

The director, Elia Kazan, wrote in his 1988 autobiography, A Life, that he shot Brando’s closeups first because the actor had to leave the set early. Steiger complained that Kazan was favouring Brando.

Kazan wrote: ‘‘I believe what had happened hurt his self-esteem but not his performance. If Steiger has played a scene better than that one, I have yet to see it.’’

Rodney Stephen Steiger was born April 14 1925, in Westhampton, New York, the only child of a struggling song-and-dance team that parted soon after his birth. His mother married again, and the boy grew up in a quarrelsome household in Newark, New Jersey.

‘‘I left home at 15 because my family had been destroyed by alcoholism,’’ he remarked in 1998. Lying about his age, he enlisted in the Navy at 16 and served in the South Pacific during the Second World War.

Back in New Jersey after the war, Steiger worked at a menial job and joined a drama group of office workers. Soon he was studying drama at the New School for Social Research. As a lark he also studied opera singing.

He was married five times. Among his wives was British actress Claire Bloom. They divorced in 1969 after ten years of marriage.