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By David Ansen

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A new kind of acting burst onto the screen in the 1950s--this New York thing called "the Method" --and its electric style was epitomized by Rod Steiger. From the start his name was linked with Marlon Brando's, thanks to the scene they played in the back seat of a car in "On the Waterfront." They were two sides of a new coin--volatile, sensitive, seething with inner demons--but where Brando tended (back then) to be Beauty, Steiger was most memorable as Beast. His turn as a vicious Hollywood producer in "The Big Knife" (1955) was scary in a whole new way.

Steiger's career was at its peak in the mid-'60s, when he played a concentration-camp survivor in "The Pawnbroker" and the sheriff in 1967's "In the Heat of the Night," which won him an Oscar. That role gave hints of his comic finesse, amply revealed as the fey Mr. Joyboy in "The Loved One." Even when subdued, Steiger--with his bull's body and tenor whine--projected volcanic reserves of emotion. There was good reason he was cast as Napoleon, Mussolini, Rasputin and Al Capone. And when Steiger went over the top (1994's "The Specialist"), he went with all mannerist jets burning. Though his career was derailed in the '80s by clinical depression, he amassed a filmography of more than 100 movie and TV credits. In good ones or bad, you could never take your eyes off him.

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