Rod Steiger, 'brooding and volatile' Hollywood tough guy for more than 50 years, dies aged 77

Rod Steiger, one of the most compelling tough-guy actors in Hollywood history, died yesterday of pneumonia in a Los Angeles hospital. He was 77.

In a career spanning half a century and more than 100 films and TV productions, the brooding and volatile Steiger played memorable roles in films as different as On The Waterfront (1954), in which he was the brother of Marlon Brando and was nominated for an Oscar, and the musical Oklahoma! The characters he portrayed included Mussolini, Rasputin, Pope John XXIII, Rudolph Hess, Pontius Pilate, Napoleon, W C Fields and Al Capone.

But the part that brought him the greatest recognition was that of the police chief of a small, racially charged southern town in In The Heat Of The Night opposite Sidney Poitier, for which he received the Academy Award for best actor in 1967. The honour astonished him, and after receiving the prized gold statuette from Audrey Hepburn he turned to Poitier to thank him "for the pleasure of a friendship which gave me the knowledge and understanding to enhance my own performance".

That skill, however, had taken root two decades earlier, when Steiger became a practitioner of the Method school of acting. This, he would always maintain, allowed him to get under the skin of the most challenging roles.

He went to the Actors Studio in New York after a turbulent early life. He was brought up by his mother after his parents separated when he was a baby. She remarried, but he lived out a somewhat grim childhood, in a household where alcohol fuelled quarrels and violence.

In 1941, at 16 years of age, Steiger ran away and after giving a false age, enlisted in the Navy, and subsequently served in the South Pacific. After the war he returned to New Jersey where he had grown up and joined a drama group of office workers before he took to studying drama full-time.

The turning point came when he was accepted into the Actors School, under Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg. His class was one for the ages; among Steiger's fellow students were Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden and Kim Stanley. There he learnt, in his words, "to act from the inside out", to "talk to other persons in the story instead of reading lines in a phoney voice".

His breakthrough came with Kazan's On The Waterfront. Among his most successful roles in the 20 years that followed was that of the concentration camp survivor Sol Nazerman in Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker of 1965. It was the film of which he was most proud, and one that brought him a second Academy Award nomination.

Steiger's greatest self-acknowledged mistake was to decline the lead in Patton, believing the film would merely glorify war and slaughter. The part was eventually taken by George C Scott, for which he earned an Academy Award.

His later career never quite lived up to the earlier promise. For almost a decade he struggled with depression and weight problems. The final years saw something of a comeback. His dream, he said in 1998, was to go out in front of the camera. The three words he desired on his tombstone were, "See You Later."