Roy Scheider was born on November 10, 1932, in Orange, New Jersey. Doctors diagnosed him with rheumatic fever at age 6, a disease that plagued him until his teenage years and left him overweight from lack of exercise. “When I was a kid, the treatment was bedrest, all the joints wrapped in cotton, and you had to stay like that until your temperature went down,” he later recalled (via “Roy Scheider: A Film Biography”). He later took up boxing and began acting in theater production in college. “Well there always was a little bit of the clown, a little bit of the show-off, a little bit of the wise guy, a little bit of the rebel,” Scheider said of his youth in a 1979 interview (via YouTube). After serving in the U.S. Air Force, his film career began with a role in a low-budget 1964 horror movie.
Scheider would soon become one of the actors who helped define the New Hollywood Movement of the 1970s, along with Robert DeNiro, Jack Nicholson, and Gene Hackman, with whom he starred in “The French Connection.” Scheider’s best-known role was as a police chief in Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster “Jaws.” In the film, Scheider improvised his most famous line — “You’re going to need a bigger boat” — just one of the weird things that happened on the set of “Jaws.”
