Legendary Jaws actor Roy Scheider dies

ROY SCHEIDER, a one-time boxer whose broken nose and pugnacious acting style made him a star in The French Connection and who later uttered one of cinematic history’s most memorable lines in Jaws, has died. He was 75.

Mr Scheider died on Sunday at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences hospital in Little Rock, hospital spokesman David Robinson said.

The hospital did not release a cause of death, but the actor had been treated for multiple myeloma at the hospital’s Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy for the past two years.

Mr Scheider earned two Academy Award nominations — a best-supporting nod for 1971’s The French Connection in which he played the police partner of Oscar winner Gene Hackman, and a best-actor nomination for 1979’s All That Jazz, the semi-autobiographical Bob Fosse film.

But he was perhaps best known for his role as a small-town police chief in Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster film Jaws, about a killer shark terrorising beachgoers — as well as millions of moviegoers.

In 2005, one of his most famous lines in the movie — “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” — was voted number 35 on the American Film Institute’s list of best quotes from US movies.

Widely hailed as the film that launched the era of the Hollywood blockbuster, Jaws was the first movie to earn $100 million at the box office.

“I’ve been fortunate to do what I consider three landmark films,” he told The Associated Press in 1986.

“The French Connection spawned a whole era of the relationship between two policemen, based on an enormous amount of truth about working on the job.

“Jaws was the first big, blockbuster outdoor-adventure film. And certainly All That Jazz is not like any old MGM musical. Each one of these films is unique, and I consider myself fortunate to be associated with them.”