Roy Scheider's trick was to look frightened and carry on working. In Jaws and The French Connection he is the plain man beside the louder one, and it is his worry that tells us the danger is real.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Brody on the beach in Jaws (1975). He sits in a deckchair, hat on, trying to keep an eye on the water while the town walks in front of him, and Scheider plays every interruption as a small ordeal. He is not brave in the film's first hour; he is anxious, out of his depth and determined to be useful anyway, and his worry is what makes the shark frightening. Scheider looks worried for two hours and never stops doing his job.
He came to films late, after years on the New York stage, with a first screen part in 1964 and not much to show for it for some while. William Friedkin gave him Buddy Russo in The French Connection (1971), the partner who stands slightly to one side of Gene Hackman's Doyle, and the pattern was set: Scheider as the steadier man beside the volatile one. He is the reason we can watch Doyle at all, because somebody on screen is registering how far he has gone. Steven Spielberg then made him a lead, and Marathon Man (1976), Sorcerer (1977, Friedkin again) and Jaws 2 (1978) followed close behind. Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979) let him play a self-destructive choreographer, about as far from a cop as he got, and it is the film his admirers reach for when they want to argue he was more than a dependable second man.
What works is economy. In Marathon Man he suggests Doc Levy's competence without turning each scene into a demonstration of it, and next to Dustin Hoffman's visible effort that restraint is a relief. His face is angular, his manner is dry, and he is at his best when the script gives him something to notice rather than something to declare. What works less well is anything that asks him to be a star on his own. Blue Thunder (1983) puts him in a helicopter and expects the helicopter's swagger to rub off, and it does not; he reads as the man standing in for the star. The quality that makes him invaluable beside Hackman and Robert Shaw leaves him a little exposed when the frame is empty.
We felt this most sharply in Jaws, where Shaw's Quint is doing the acting and Scheider is doing the listening, and we found we were more afraid for Brody than for anyone else on the boat. Shaw pushes Quint towards theatre; Scheider stays small, and the smallness is what makes the sea look big. It is the kind of work that gets overlooked because it is built to be, and his reputation has paid for it.
Later there was seaQuest DSV (1993–96) on television, and character parts such as Dr Benway in David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991) and a turn in The Punisher (2004), and he worked until his death in 2008. Start with Jaws, then The French Connection, and notice how often your eye goes to him when somebody else is talking.
Biography
Roy Scheider was an American actor. He was born on 10 November 1932 in Orange, New Jersey, and died on 10 February 2008 in Little Rock, Arkansas.
He studied at Rutgers University and Franklin and Marshall College, and began his career in theatre, including work with the New York Shakespeare Festival. Scheider gained prominence in the 1970s with roles in The French Connection (1971) and Klute (1971). He is best known for playing Police Chief Martin Brody in Jaws (1975) and its 1978 sequel, as well as Joe Gideon in All That Jazz (1979). He received Academy Award nominations for his performances in The French Connection and All That Jazz. Later credits include Marathon Man (1976), 2010 (1984) and the television series seaQuest DSV (1993–1996), in which he played Captain Nathan Bridger.
