Roy Scheider died today at the age 0f 75. I worked with him briefly on the NBC series SEAQUEST and one of the things I remember most about him was how he’d sit on a folding chair outside of his trailer, soaking up the sun wearing nothing but a g-string sized Speedo. Apparently, Richard Dreyfuss has similar memories:
Dreyfuss recalled Sunday a time during the filming of ‘Jaws’
when Scheider disappeared from the set. As the filming was on hold
because of the weather, Scheider "called me up and said, ‘You
don’t know where I am if they call.’"He’d gone to get a tan. He was really very tan-addicted. That
was due to a childhood affliction where he was in bed for a long
time. For him being tan was being healthy," Dreyfuss said.
I’m very sorry to hear of Roy Scheider’s passing. He was one of my favorite actors, and he had real movie star charisma. All That Jazz is still one of my all-time favorite films. I was just thinking about Roy Scheider and his work when you brought up Seaquest recently in another post, and I commented, writing that silly scene where he had to fire Darwin, the talking dolphin, when the series was cancelled. When Jaws became the biggest grossing film of it’s era, a great deal of the credit belonged to Roy Scheider’s performance as the affable, water-phobic police chief.
I remember reading that the producers of Jaws 2 were irked because Scheider insisted on getting good and tan during filming and, since the movie was shot out of sequence, his skin color was not consistent. R.I.P. “Chief Brody.”
I worked with him in Utah on a film. Nice man.