Roy Richard Scheider, American actor and amateur boxer, Died at 75

Dead, Roy Richard Scheider on February 10, 2008 at the age of 75, he was an American actor and amateur boxer.

Born in Orange, New Jersey, the son of Anna Scheider (née Crosson) and auto mechanic Roy Bernhard Scheider.

Scheider’s mother was of Irish Catholic background and his father was German American and Protestant.

As a child, Scheider was an athlete, participating in organized baseball and boxing competitions, for which he was classed as a welterweight, weighing in at 140 lbs.

Scheider competed in the Diamond Gloves Boxing Tournament in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He attended Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, and was inducted into the school’s hall of fame in 1985.

He traded his boxing gloves for the stage, studying drama at both Rutgers University and Franklin and Marshall College, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity.

Scheider was lead star in the Steven Spielberg-produced television series SeaQuest DSV as Captain Nathan Bridger.

During the second season, Scheider voiced disdain for the direction in which the series was heading.

His comments were highly publicized, and the media criticized him for panning his own show.

NBC made additional casting and writing changes in the third season, and Scheider decided to leave the show.

His contract, however, required that he make several guest appearances that season.

He also repeatedly guest-starred on the NBC television series Third Watch as Fyodor Chevchenko.

In the early 1970s the Peter Benchley novel “Jaws” was a phenomenal best-seller, and young director Steven Spielberg was chosen by Universal Pictures to direct the film adaptation, Jaws (1975), in which Scheider played police chief Brody and shared lead billing with Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss in the tale of a New England seaside community terrorized by a hungry Great White shark.

“Jaws” was a blockbuster, and for many years held the record as the highest-grossing film of all time.

Scheider then turned up as the shady CIA agent brother of Dustin Hoffman in the unnerving Marathon Man (1976) and in the misfired William Friedkin-directed remake of The Wages of Fear (1953) titled Sorcerer (1977), before again returning to Amity to battle another giant shark in Jaws 2 (1978).

Seeking a change from tough cops and hungry sharks, he took the role of womanizing, drug-popping choreographer Joe Gideon, the lead character of the semi-autobiographical portrayal of director Bob Fosse in the sparkling All That Jazz (1979).

Returning to another law enforcement role, Scheider played a rebellious helicopter pilot in the John Badham conspiracy / action film Blue Thunder (1983), a scientist in the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) simply titled 2010 (1984), a cheating husband who turns the tables on his blackmailers in 52 Pick-Up (1986), a cold-blooded hit man in Cohen and Tate (1988) and a CIA operative in the muddled and slow-moving The Russia House (1990).

The versatile Scheider was then cast as the captain of a futuristic submarine in the relatively popular TV series SeaQuest 2032 (1993), which ran for three seasons.

On March 4, 2007, Scheider was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the SunDeis Film Festival at Brandeis University, following a screening of his classic film All That Jazz (1979).

It was the sixth time that Scheider had seen the film, and the first time for his young daughter, Molly, who accompanied him.