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SCHEIDER, ROY (1932– ). American actor.
After an apprenticeship on television and an inauspicious film debut in The Curse of the Living Corpse, Scheider first distinguished himself, if that is the word, as the most unimpressive of the three male leads in Jaws, for which he was duly punished by being summoned back to parody his own weak performance in the unintentionally laughable Jaws II. A series of further embarrassments ensued: the film designed to establish him as a major film actor, the misleadingly-titled Sorcerer (1977), didn't; in the surrealistic All That Jazz, his tendency
towards excess, matched by that of director Bob Fosse, drove the film way over the top; and it is just as well that the fulsome sentimentality of the Disney movie Tiger Town went largely unnoticed. Only some successfully executed routines in the mildly futuristic Blue Thunder served to counter Hollywood's growing suspicion that Scheider's laborious histrionics were box-office poison. Regarding his next major disappointment, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, the kindest thing to say is that Scheider was miscast. In the original 2001: A Space Odyssey, Heywood Floyd, portrayed with appropriately limited skill by William Sylvester, was a perfect embodiment of homo bureaucratis, a functional cog in the world's societal machinery
of which the supercomputer HAL was only a natural extension; and, while the film's co-author Arthur C. CLARKE fleshed out the character in subsequent novels, he remained a man most noteworthy for his sedate ordinariness. To play such a character, why on Earth would anyone cast an actor who would inevitably attempt to transform Floyd into a bellowing, passionate heroic figure? But that was part of director Peter HYAMS's vision, unsurprisingly repudiated by film audiences. In the 1990s, no longer being offered leading roles in major films (unless one counts his unexpected appearance in Naked Lunch), Scheider was called back to the spotlight one more time by Steven SPIELBERG, who, having failed to emulate the success of Rod SERLING's The Twilight Zone with Amazing Stories,
now set his sights lower and endeavored to emulate the success of Irwin ALLEN's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea with SeaQuest DSV. Incredibly, he failed again, due in large part to his decision to cast Scheider as the captain of the series's high-tech submarine. Watching him flail about, vainly struggling to animate the proceedings, one gained a new appreciation for the underrated
talents of Richard BASEHART. Belatedly recognizing what the problem was, the producers made a last, desperate effort to save SeaQuest DSV by humiliatingly removing Scheider from his leading role and placing Michael Ironside in command, but to no avail. In lieu of regular visits to the gym, Scheider maintains his excellent physical condition by continuing to act, mostly in supporting roles and in foreign productions, and he has recently (and oddly) emerged as a favorite choice to play the President of the United States (in Executive Target [1997], The Peacekeeper, and Chain of Command). But I'd cast my presidential vote for an actor like Martin Sheen or Harrison FORD, who gets excited when he needs to but otherwise remains cool, calm, and collected during a crisis—a talent that the hard-working Roy Scheider never mastered. |
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