Better than Brando? Why Rod Steiger should have been a contender

Rod Steiger, the burly and beloved star born a century ago this week, could have become the greatest film actor of all time. Or at least, like his character's brother in On the Waterfront, he coulda been a contender.
His early performances were extraordinary displays of Method acting that matched those of Marlon Brando, his co-star in Waterfront and perennial rival. His intensity and naturalism stunned the doyens of film criticism – Pauline Kael: 'Steiger seems to take over a picture even when he isn't in the lead'; Roger Ebert: 'I don't know how he does it' – and the hulking frame and granite countenance that denied him leading-man roles should have opened up a long career full of complex characters.
But beneath Steiger's tough-guy persona was a traumatised child and a tortured adult, whose unpredictable, explosive depressions torpedoed his career and denied him ultimate acting greatness. He ricocheted between long, comatose withdrawals from reality and wild rages, suicide attempts and murderous fantasies.
And yet in the final years of Steiger's life something extraordinary happened. He recovered from the worst of his depression and spoke out about his mental health, raising huge amounts for charity and redefining his sense of purpose. While Brando became increasingly withdrawn and sybaritic, Steiger was changing the world.
Steiger was born in Long Island, New York in 1925, and his problems started when he was young. His parents, Fred and Lorraine Steiger, had travelled the country together as a song-and-dance act but, shortly after Lorraine gave birth, Fred left the house and never came back. Lorraine remarried – Steiger treated her second husband as his real father – but then that man disappeared, too, leaving a note saying that he was off for a drink but not returning for two years.
The effect on the young Steiger was profound. In his words, it left him forever with 'a void, a hold, an emptiness, a blackness, a longing'. And the double abandonment exacerbated his mother's drinking problems, which had begun after a botched operation permanently crippled her leg.
Steiger was a popular and talented schoolboy but his family's unstable finances and his mother's drinking were causes of great embarrassment. As a young child he often had to walk Lorraine out of bars and back home by hand. Aged five he came downstairs on Christmas morning to discover that his house was empty, his mother was nowhere to be seen, and the Christmas tree was lying flat on the floor. Lorraine was out on a mammoth drinking session and only came home three days later.
At the same age Steiger suffered another trauma when a local paedophile lured him into his house by promising the boy a look at his extensive butterfly collection. He then molested Steiger before fleeing town the next day.
'This is why child abuse is so monstrous,' Steiger would later say. 'The child has no experience, he or she cannot comprehend what is happening to him. I knew it was wrong, deep-down… but it was also very exciting. No child should ever have to be exposed to that kind of emotion.'
Steiger ran away from home at 16 and joined the US Navy. In service during World War Two he discovered his acting talents between feats of spectacular courage, including once hanging precariously on to the deck of a warship during a typhoon. In quieter moments he loved to recite Shakespeare to his fellow sailors and perfect his telling of dirty jokes, which were especially enjoyed by his ship's chaplain.
He was embarrassingly discharged from the navy because of a severe skin condition that caused him to bleed through his uniform (it was possibly eczema, possibly acne), but his period in service had given him a lifelong love of the theatrical.
After returning to New Jersey to look after his mother – who did eventually beat her alcoholism – Steiger used the adult education offered to him by the GI Bill of Rights to study drama formally. His precocious talent was clear to his teachers and he was invited to join the prestigious new Actors Studio in New York without even having to audition.
Here the great teacher Lee Strasberg was tutoring the lives of a young Brando in the Method, a new way of acting that used your own experiences and emotions to inform performances.
Steiger became an eager and consummate disciple. In the navy he'd embraced his bulk and played up his masculinity, ditching the name Rodney for the more macho 'Rod' and putting on a deep voice. But Method acting allowed Steiger to reveal his sensitive side. 'It was a wonderful tool,' he remembered. 'Why, it even allowed men to cry.'
New York loved him. He quickly accumulated barnstorming performances on stage and in TV dramas – in the early 1950s he was filming one every week – and was counted alongside Brando and James Dean as part of a new generation of naturalistic, impassioned young performers.
Steiger lacked their vaguely epicene looks and was temperamentally incapable of their hysterical outbursts. So he became the working man's Method Actor. He had spent his childhood in bread queues and his teenage years on warships – and it showed. But that worldly experience made him distinctive.
It also made him the perfect choice to play Brando's older sibling in On the Waterfront, his first hit film and greatest masterpiece. Steiger invested sympathy in the pathetic and doomed Charley, who betrayed his brother at a crucial moment in his boxing career and consigned him to a life of crime and poverty. Although he never delivers a spectacular cadenza like Brando's taxi speech, Steiger grounds the film in a naturalism rarely seen on film before. The rivalry between the two stars – who didn't get along off-camera – gave the movie its phenomenal energy, and helped make it a worldwide success.
As a young man scarred by the humiliations of childhood, Steiger had sworn to himself that 'one day you're going to do something so good no one will laugh at the name Steiger again'. Well, no one was laughing at him now.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s his career gathered further momentum – he was great as a Holocaust survivor in The Pawnbroker, and memorable in Dr Zhivago and Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One. In 1967 he played a racist, emotionally suppressed sheriff opposite Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night and won an Oscar for his performance.
But in the year after that film's release, Steiger was not offered a single role. His career was already beginning to go downhill and he didn't help things by making some poor decisions about which projects to choose. He turned down the acclaimed biopic Patton, his 'dumbest career move', but signed up for the spaghetti western Duck, You Sucker! the following year. (Though Duck, You Sucker! is better than it sounds.)
Steiger also became prone to making eccentric decisions when filming – in Waterloo he played a peculiarly dopey Napoleon after imagining that the Emperor 'bombed himself out on laudanum' before battles – and developed a reputation for hamminess. His career was tailspinning just as Brando's was experiencing an extraordinary renaissance, as he starred in The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris and Apocalypse Now.
Even worse, Steiger's health was deteriorating. Maintaining his colossal weight had consequences and he underwent open-heart surgery in 1976 and again in 1979. After the second operation, his mental health fell off a cliff.
The traumas of his childhood finally combined with his work and health anxieties in a spiral of crippling tenebrousness. He became so depressed that he was often rendered almost comatose, spending days on end in silence, numbly watching sport on TV or staring out at the ocean from his window. 'You begin to lose self-esteem,' he recalled of his worst depressive episodes. 'You don't walk, you don't shave and if no one was watching you'd go to the bathroom right where you were sitting.'
On other occasions Steiger would go wild. '[Once] I locked myself in a room downstairs. For three days I tore the walls. I tore myself up. I bit myself. People forget we are the highest form of animal. A-n-i-m-a-l. The animal can take over and destroy.' He twice almost shot himself – 'I figured I'd go out in a fishing boat, lower myself into the water and put a gun in my mouth' – and fantasised about murdering his family.
This period of intense depression lasted eight years and nearly destroyed Steiger's career for good. But Steiger eventually hauled himself back into public life with the help of medication and his fourth wife, Paula Ellis. And then he transformed himself; suddenly he determined to use his own suffering to help others.
Steiger spoke out about his experiences prodigiously, in a way that his contemporaries simply did not, and despite being widely advised not to. 'My present manager and my agent both say, 'If you talk about your depression, people will think you're crazy,'' he told the LA Times, during an interview that ultimately focused on that exact subject.
In 1994 he spoke on behalf of the National Institute of Mental Health in front of a Senate panel, and read a six-page long poem, Hitting the Bottom, about his troubled mind. By the time he had finished reading, the assembled panel were all in tears and $24 million in mental health research had been guaranteed for the Institute. He later read the poem on CNN. For days afterwards the network received more than 100 phone calls per hour from moved viewers.
'I try to fight the stigma against mental disease,' he said shortly after. 'It's much more important for me to talk about depression and what it can do to a person than to talk about the movies I've made.'
Hollywood never gave up on Steiger completely. He appeared in 90 movies, and notched up plenty of roles that audiences adored. He loved to play egomaniacs and eccentrics from the past – Napoleon, Mussolini, Rasputin, Al Capone, WC Fields. (Name a big-boned historical figure and Steiger probably depicted him.)
He never appeared in as many masterpieces as Brando and is never talked about now in the same reverent tone. But in the final stages of the two men's lives there can be no question of who achieved more. The late-life, lugubrious, humungous Brando retreated into himself – and there was plenty of himself to retreat into – while Steiger opened himself up to the world.
He'd survived familial misery, child abuse, a world war, years in the spotlight and some of the worst mental health imaginable. But the great prizefighter of Hollywood never gave up.
An acting student once asked the old Steiger what it was like to be a star. He replied: 'You go 16 rounds. You are hurt. You are bloody. And they finally lift your hand up and you've won. And then the bell rings for the next round.'

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