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| Roy Scheider Interview #1 |
| Excerpt from the book Academy Awards 1980 Oscar Annual by Art Sarno. Nominee Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role, 1979 ROY SCHEIDER as Joe Gideon in ALL THAT JAZZ The practice of comparing movie newcomers to predecessors is fairly common in Hollywood. Every shapely blonde is the "new Marilyn Monroe" and every offbeat stage actor is the "next Brando." Such comparisons help in the beginning, but there comes a time when the performer wants to be recognized for himself. A case in point is Roy Scheider, who has struggled for personal identity despite leading roles in a series of successful films. "I have been called the next everything-the next Gary Grant, George C. Scott, Spencer Tracy and Bogart," he once complained. "I'd just like to be called the next Roy Scheider." The film that turned it all around for Scheider is All That Jazz, Bob Fosse's hugely inventive and highly stylized musical drama. The film is largely the story of Fosse's own life, with Scheider cast as the Fosse character. A startling change of pace, it is the most critically acclaimed role of Scheider's career, a fact which gives him no small sense of triumph. "You can't imagine what most of Hollywood said when Fosse first announced me," a smiling Scheider admitted to the Los Angeles Times. "They told him he was committing professional suicide." What makes this all the more satisfying is the fact he wasn't even the first choice for the part. Richard Dreyfuss was. But after two weeks Dreyfuss decided it was not for him and departed the project. Scheider's success in the role is impressive because he is a straight actor and Fosse is a choreographer and director of uncommon ability. "When we started," Scheider recalled for Bernard Drew of American Film magazine, "the most difficult thing for me as an actor was to convince myself that I could portray a choreographer who tells the topflight dancers Fosse used what to do. In the early stages, when Bob and I were still feeling each other out, he would tell me about personal experiences in his own life, so that I could better relate to the character. But as the picture went on and I gained confidence, he gave me more freedom. So I was able to use my own instincts." Despite the obvious similarities to Fosse's life, Scheider didn't think of the film as a biography. "I always felt we were doing a highly theatrical entertainment," he explains. "Sure, it's based on things in Bob's life, just as 81/2 was based on Fellini's, but for me, to finally be effective, Joe Gideon had to be, ultimately, a synthesis between Bob and me-not quite all of him, not quite all of me, but both of us." For a long time, Scheider, thanks to his many macho screen roles, was stereotyped as a tough guy. All That Jazz might change his image, which doesn't concern him. "The audience creates the image," he contends. "You don't do anything. They lock onto you. You become a quantity they either enjoy seeing or they don't enjoy seeing. And that shows up at the box office." No overnight success, he worked long and hard in many different places to get where he is today. "I always knew I could make a living as an actor but I never thought I'd get this far," he admits. Born in Orange, New Jersey, Scheider spent a good deal of his youth in bed. "1 was a sickly kid-rheumatic fever-and I was bedridden at various times," he explained to writer Guy Flately. "But every Saturday I went to the matinee in Irvington, and my parents always took me along on Thursday, their night out at the movies. I sat in the front row, eating popcorn, with my feet propped up on the brass rail and my eyes glued on the screen. I dreamed, and the movies took me to the South Seas, to all the places I wanted to go." Because of his health, he did not participate in sports as a youth. When his doctors finally gave him the green light, he went to the Jersey shore and swam every day, shedding 45 bedridden pounds in one year. He also began working out at the local 'Y' with a former middleweight fighter who liked his style and entered him in the Golden Gloves competition in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He won his first fight and had his nose broken in the second, ending any thoughts he might have harbored about the ring as a career. He entered Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to study law-more his father's idea than his own. But he began acting in college and when he graduated told his father he intended to become an actor. "He was aghast," Scheider remembers. "Not until many years later, when some success came to me in this business, could he understand that perhaps I knew what I was doing." He later played off-Broadway, where he won an Obie, and became part of the prestigious Lincoln Repertory Company in New York. After more than a decade in repertory theater, he began to appear on the Hollywood screen in increasingly important roles. His films include Klute, The French Connection, The Seven-Ups, Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York, Jaws, Jaws 2, Marathon Man and Sorcerer. |
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