Roy Scheider has died in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the age of 75. He had battled cancer in recent years; the cause of death has been reported as complications from a staph infection. Scheider made his film debut in a 1962 horror movie called The Curse of the Living Corpse and throughout the 1960s worked on the stage and on such TV soaps as The Edge of Night, Love of Life, and The Secret Storm. He began to get small movie roles in the late '60s, and had a breakout year in 1971, when, as a thirty-nine-year-old juvenile, he played Jane Fonda's pimp in Klute and Gene Hackman's police partner in The French Connection. (In interviews, and ultimately in a commentary track on The French Connection DVD, Scheider liked to tell a story about how he won the part after someone saw him blow a stage audition and was impressed with the brio with which off the director.) Scheider got an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the role, which would ultimately lead to his getting his first leading role in The Seven-Ups, a 1973 cop thriller directed by the French Connection producer Philip D'Antoni. But it was of course the 1975 Jaws that was Scheider's biggest hit and the movie that made him a familiar face to the public at large, and beloved to a generation of pop-eyed movie freaks.
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