(9 Jul 2002) SHOTLIST
1. Pan across from poster to Rod Steiger sitting at his desk.
2. B roll of Rod Steiger's Star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame.
3. B roll of Steiger giving an interview.
4. B roll of Steiger at the End Of Days Premiere.
ROD STEIGER DIES
Rod Steiger, the beefy, intense actor who won the Academy Award as best actor of 1967 for his role as the unrelenting Southern police chief in "In the Heat of the Night," died Tuesday. He was 78.
Steiger died at a Los Angeles-area hospital of pneumonia and kidney failure, said his publicist, Lori De Waal.
A devoted practitioner of method acting, Steiger prided himself in undertaking challenging roles, especially real-life persons. "My generation of actors was taught to be able to create different people; that's what an actor is supposed to do," he explained.
Steiger played his most famous scene with Marlon Brando in "On the Waterfront." As the two brothers ride in the rear of a taxi, Brando castigates Steiger for making him throw a boxing match: "I coulda had class! I coulda been a contender."
Rodney Stephen Steiger was born April 14, 1925, in Westhampton, New York, the only child of a struggling song-and-dance team that parted soon after his birth.
His mother married again, and the boy grew up in a quarrelsome household in Newark, New Jersey.
Lying about his age, he enlisted in the Navy at 16 and served in the South Pacific during World War II.
Back in New Jersey after the war, Steiger worked at a menial job and joined a drama group of office workers.
Soon he was studying drama at the New School for Social Research. As a lark he also studied opera singing.
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