Roy Scheider

Scheider twice married in his lifetime. His first marriage was to Cynthia Bebout in 1962. The couple was blessed with a daughter, Maximillia. They divorced in 1986.

He then married actress Brenda Siemer in 1989. With her, he had a son, Christian. The couple adopted a daughter Molly. They remained married until his death in 2008.

In 2004, Scheider was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of white blood cells. He underwent a bone marrow transplantation to treat the cancer in June 2005.

Roy Scheider was born on November 10, 1932 in Orange, New Jersey to Irish Catholic mother Anna Scheider and German American Protestant father Roy Bernhard Scheider. Senior Scheider was an auto mechanic by profession.

In his early days, young Scheider had a great passion for athletics. He took part in various baseball and boxing competitions. Weighing 140 lbs, he competed in welterweight category.

He boxed as an amateur for three years from 1946 to 1949 and even competed at the Diamond Gloves Boxing Tournament where he sustained a broken nose. Scheider turned the tournament in his favour after a loss to Myron Greenberg by recording 13 knockout victories back to back.

On the academic front, Scheider attended Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey. He was bit by the acting bug during his student days. He let go off his passion for boxing and instead turned to acting.

He studied drama at Rutgers University and Franklin and Marshall College, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity.

Post his studies, he made a short stint in military by serving as an officer in the United States Air Force where he rose to the rank of First Lieutenant. Thereafter, he made his debut on stage with the play, ‘Stephen D’ at the New York Shakespeare Festival for which he even won an Obie Award.

Scheider breakthrough in films came in 1963 with the horror film, ‘The Curse of the Living Corpse’. Following his debut, he was cast in two films in 1968, ‘Star’ and ‘Paper Lion’.

Though he was a couple of films old in the film industry, yet he did not gain popularity until 1971. That year, he played two spectacular roles - the first being for Jane Fonda’s thriller ‘Klute’ and later as Det. Buddy Russo in crime-drama ‘The French Connection’, featuring alongside Gene Hackman. His role of a fictionalized tough street cop won him an Academy Award nomination.

Scheider’s tough street cop role in ‘The French Connection’ was so much appreciated that he bagged yet another tough cop role as NYC Det Buddy Manucci in the 1973 underappreciated ‘The Seven-Ups’. The film had one of the best car chase sequences ever.

In 1975, he portrayed the role of Chief Martin Brody in ‘Jaws’ featuring Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfus. A Steven Spielberg film, it was based on Peter Benchley’s bestselling novel of the same name. The film went on to become a blockbuster and for years remained the highest grossing film of all time. His acting in the film earned him rave reviews.

In his more than forty decades of acting career, Scheider gave some of the most scintillating performances which kept the audience hungry for more. His best came in the decade of 1970s when he featured in big blockbusters, including, ‘The French Connection’, ‘Jaws’, ‘Jaws 2’, ‘Marathon Man’, ‘Sorcerer’ and ‘All That Jazz’. ‘Jaws’ was a major smash hit and went on to become the highest grossing film of all time, a record it held for years. It was the first film in the history of cinema to gross more than $100 million. His most famous line in ‘Jaws’, the ad-libbed ‘You're gonna need a bigger boat,’ was voted No. 35 on the American Film Institute's list of best quotes from movies.