Rod Steiger: 10 essential films

Whether in a supporting role or as the lead, Rod Steiger was best known for his fevered intensity. He specialised in playing explosive men. Nevertheless, he was just as powerful when reigning in his propensity for going big, whether as villains who were eerily still, or as ordinary men fighting lonely battles within themselves.

Steiger was a man of the Method. He learned his trade in the same acting class as Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint and Karl Malden, all of whom he’d star alongside in his second movie, On the Waterfront (1954). Before he got there, though, he’d honed his craft on more than 200 live TV productions; it was he who originated the eponymous role in Paddy Chayefsky’s acclaimed teleplay Marty (two years later, Ernest Borgnine would win an Oscar for playing the same character in the film adaptation).

Steiger appeared on screen consistently all the way up until the millennium, but he made few notable movies after the early 1970s, his filmography eaten up by schlock that indulged his maximalist, scenery-chewing impulses at the expense of his subtler work. In the first two decades of his career, however, there were few that could match him for his range, courage, and gravitas.

Here are 10 of his best performances:

Director: Elia Kazan

As a mid-level gangster caught between the fear of his boss (Lee J. Cobb) and the need to protect his little brother (Marlon Brando), Steiger’s Charley Malloy is a man wracked with conflict. Brando’s backseat “I coulda been a contender!” speech became rightfully legendary, yet Steiger’s side of that same taxi ride is actually far more dramatic, as he enters the car committed to appeasing his nefarious employer, then decides to do the right thing by his brother, at grave cost to himself. Steiger depicts that decision in very few words, letting the torment, fear and eventual resignation play out on his face. It’s a quiet but indelible performance.

Director: Robert Aldrich

Stanley Hoff (Steiger) is “a man with a crocodile’s temper”, the head of an artistically bankrupt but financially successful movie studio, who’s determined to hook star player Charlie Castle (Jack Palance) for another seven year contract. Charlie desperately doesn’t want to sign. Stanley has dirt that could land him in prison if he refuses. With bleached blonde hair and a tendency to wear sunglasses indoors, Stanley was the first of Steiger’s many larger-than-life villains. He proves just as effective during his less overtly dramatic moments, however, concealing his coiled menace behind the thin veil of Hollywood bonhomie.

Director: Mark Robson

In the last movie of Humphrey Bogart’s career, Steiger is a shady boxing promoter who lures Bogart’s recently canned sportswriter into becoming the press agent for his latest fighter – an enormous fellow who cannot withstand a punch, and is only successful because his opponents have been paid to take dives. Steiger plays his villain as an itchy, anxious man, so fast-talking that he sometimes gets through a whole paragraph of dialogue without taking a single breath. He knows he needs Bogart’s wiles to succeed, and that deft manipulation will be necessary to overrule the writer’s essential good-heartedness. That sets up a gripping dynamic between the two great actors.

Director: Sidney Lumet

This acclaimed Sidney Lumet film sees Steiger as Sol Nazerman, a Holocaust survivor who has been making a living as a lonely, misanthropic NYC pawnbroker. Although many of his most famous turns were known for their aforementioned explosive quality (so much so that Lumet was doubtful he was right for this role), Steiger played the titular character as if he’d been quietly imploding for more than two decades, all that horror having nowhere to go and nothing to do but smother him from the inside. Steiger’s wrenchingly inward portrayal was widely praised, with the actor himself describing it as his favourite of his own performances.

Director: David Lean

In Doctor Zhivago, Steiger is a small yet vital part of a sprawling ensemble. He plays Komarovsky, an initially paternal figure towards the movie’s 17 year-old heroine Lara (Julie Christie), whose interest in her soon becomes romantic. She doesn’t share those feelings, but that doesn’t stop him acting on them, and his shadow haunts Lara for the rest of the film. While Komarovsky does a monstrous thing, Steiger gives him a disconcertingly warped humanity, allowing us to believe that – in his mind, at least – he really does care for the woman he’s treated so abominably. It’s a thorny, discomfiting and fascinating turn.

Director: Norman Jewison

Steiger won the sole Oscar of his career for his role as the white Southern police chief Bill Gillespie, who forms an uneasy alliance with a Black Northern homicide detective, Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), in order to solve the murder of a local businessman. Though marinated in the racism of his environment, Gillespie is a little more open to working with a Black man than many of his colleagues, while simultaneously being both awed by and resentful of Tibbs’ superior skill. Steiger is excellent at teasing out the different nuances of Gillespie’s attitude, in the process creating a character full of all-too-human contradiction.

Directors: Jack Smight

Not only does No Way to Treat a Lady give us Rod Steiger at his scenery-chewing best, it gives us the performer in a host of different guises. He plays failed actor and serial killer Christopher Gill, who works out his mother complex by playing various costumed characters (among them a priest, a very camp hairdresser and a German plumber), conning old ladies into letting him into their homes, and then murdering them. Director Jack Smight often tried to get Steiger to tone his performance down, and what made it in the film was the result of their compromise. It’s hard to imagine how big Steiger might have gone without that directorial intervention – however, their next project together, 1969’s notoriously out-there The Illustrated Man, gives us a clue…

Director: John Flynn

Still flying high after his Oscar win, Steiger took a big pay cut to star in The Sergeant – a low-key, sensitive movie about a repressed American army sergeant (Steiger) in post-WWII France, and the way his efforts to quell his agonising attraction to a young private (John Phillip Law) sometimes manifest into cruelty. Steiger is quietly devastating as the tortured central character, giving his desperate loneliness an aching, tangible weight. His ability to pivot from bone-deep vulnerability to chilling malice in the blink of an eye show that as well as being a formidably powerful actor, he was also an immensely dextrous one.

Director: Sergei Bondarchuk

At the time of release, Waterloo was one of the most expensive movies ever made. It’s still breathtaking in its scale and grandeur. Fifteen thousand accurately clad men recreated the most famous battle in military history, and in the middle of them all was Steiger as Napoleon Bonaparte. While both Steiger’s performance and the overall production weren’t well-received at the time – their critical and commercial failure even (erroneously) blamed for the kiboshing of Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon project – the years have been kind to Waterloo. The film remains an astonishing spectacle, and Steiger’s troubled intensity gives it all a convincingly human centre.

Director: Sergio Leone

The tale of a Mexican bandit (Steiger) and a fugitive IRA explosives mastermind (James Coburn) who team up to inadvertently help lead a revolution, A Fistful of Dynamite was the least-loved of Sergio Leone’s classic spaghetti westerns, but undeservedly so. It’s a surprisingly sweet film, made all the more so by the warm chemistry between the two men at its centre: Steiger and Coburn are a pleasure to watch together. Although Steiger’s casting as a Mexican was certainly dubious, he elevates the role far beyond the initial broad stereotype, adding great depth and emotional texture to a man who is far more complex than he initially appears.