Oscar-winning actor Rod Steiger dead at 77

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Rod Steiger, the gruff-voiced actor best known for his Oscar-winning turn as a Southern police chief in 1967's "In the Heat of the Night," died Tuesday. He was 77.

He died around 9 a.m. of pneumonia and kidney failure at a Los Angeles-area hospital, according to his publicist, Lori DeWaal.

Steiger was known for his intense portrayals, reveling in the Method acting he had been taught in the late 1940s. He played the forlorn butcher in the original 1953 television version of "Marty," opposite Nancy Marchand; Marlon Brando's mobster brother in "On the Waterfront," in 1954; and a Holocaust survivor in 1965's "The Pawnbroker."

He also starred as a number of historical figures, including Benito Mussolini, Napoleon, Rasputin, Pontius Pilate, and Al Capone.

CNN NewsPass VIDEO Rod Steiger, who won the 1967 Oscar for best actor for his role as the police chief in 'In the Heat of the Night,' has died. He was 77. CNN's Aaron Brown reports (July 10) Play video   MORE STORIES Rod Steiger: filmography

In addition, Steiger campaigned extensively to remove the public stigma of mental illness following his own recuperation from severe depression.

"He was a wonderfully creative actor and a very good friend," writer Ray Bradbury told The Associated Press. Steiger played the title character in "The Illustrated Man," the 1969 film based on Bradbury's book of short stories.

Acting 'from the inside out'

Steiger was born on April 1, 1925, in West Hampton, New York, the son of parents who were once a song-and-dance team. His parents divorced when he was an infant, and his mother remarried and moved to New Jersey. To escape from his home, rife with alcoholism and argument, Steiger lied about his age and enlisted in the Navy when he was 16.

He spent four years in the Pacific during World War II, including serving in the Iwo Jima and Okinawa campaigns. It was in the Navy that he started thinking, perhaps subconsciously, about an acting career.

Rod Steiger, shown here in the mid-'90s, won an Oscar for 1967's "In the Heat of the Night."

"I didn't realize it at the time, but I was on a destroyer with 280 people and I didn't know I was going to be an actor," Steiger said, according to his publicist's statement. "But I know my Southern accent was picked up from a guy named King." The accent later became that of the chief in "In the Heat of the Night."

When he returned from the war, Steiger studied at the Actors Studio, where his classmates included Brando, Karl Malden, Eva Marie Saint and Kim Stanley.

"Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg, the school directors, taught me to act from the inside out," Steiger said in 1956. "I learned what it means to talk to other persons in the story instead of reading lines in a phony voice."

Steiger found work in the theater and in live television drama during television's so-called "Golden Age." Eventually, he accumulated more than 100 film and TV credits during an acting career that spanned 55 years.

Creating rounded human beings

The pinnacle of his career was winning the 1967 best actor Oscar for his role as Bill Gillespie, the small-town sheriff who has to share his turf with a black big-city detective to solve a grisly murder case.

He was also nominated for best actor in "The Pawnbroker" and for best supporting actor for his gritty portrayal of the "On the Waterfront" racketeer who gave his life to save his brother, portrayed by Marlon Brando.

It was Steiger's character who fixed the boxing match that inspired Brando's taxi-cab lament: "I coulda been a contender."

Other memorable roles included a cigar-chomping fight manager in 1956's "The Harder They Fall" and the mustachioed commissar Komarovsky in "Dr. Zhivago," in 1965.

In portraying figures some might consider bigger than life, Steiger once said, "The first thing you have to do is forget who they are. You have to create them as a rounded human being. When I did Napoleon, they wanted me to put my hand inside the jacket, and I wouldn't do that, because it had become a caricature over time."

Instead, after seeing the real Napoleon's eyeglasses on display in a museum, he offered up a sometimes bespectacled portrait of the French emperor. "Those glasses meant, 'Gee, he's a human being, too,' " Steiger said.

Steiger stopped working for eight years when he was clinically depressed, and he later went public with his ordeal in hopes of generating greater public understanding and acceptance of mental illness.

"My agent said, 'If you talk about this depression, people will think you're crazy,' " he recently told Parade magazine. "That's the point. You're not crazy; that's why I speak out."