Roy Scheider ‘JAWS’ Passes Away

Roy Scheider, a two-time Oscar nominee, died on Sunday. He was best known for his role as the police chief in Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film, Jaws, the enduring classic about a killer shark terrorising beachgoers. And that film won him millions of fans.

The New York Times’s obit: “Besides his wife, his survivors include three children, Christian Verrier Scheider and Molly Mae Scheider, with Ms. Seimer, and Maximillia Connelly Lord, from an earlier marriage, to Cynthia Bebout; a brother, Glenn Scheider of Summit, N.J.; and two grandchildren.

“His professional debut was as Mercutio in a 1961 New York Shakespeare Festival production of ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ While continuing to work onstage, he made his movie debut in ‘The Curse of the Living Corpse’ (1964), a low-budget horror film by the prolific schlockmeister Del Tenney. ‘He had to bend his knees to die into a moat full of quicksand up in Connecticut,’ recalled Ms. Seimer, a documentary filmmaker. ‘He loved to demonstrate that’.”