One of Hollywood's most underappreciated leading men, Roy Scheider, was recently lost to us. The picture I've posted is from his role in Jaws, by far Steven Spielberg's best film. It was also Scheider's best role - to the best of my knowledge, he was the leading man in a critically successful Hollywood film only once after Jaws: in Bob Fosse's All that Jazz, which I lamentably have not seen. You might recognize him as Gene Hackman's partner in The French Connection, and, if you're super dorky, you might recognize him in the role that first exposed me to him, as a nerdtacular scifi child of 10 years old: Captain Nathan Bridger of Seaquest, which could pretty much be summed up as "Star Trek: TNG in a Submarine, with Sam Raimi's crappy brother Ted in a role in which we are inexplicably supposed to think he's cool, and Jonathan Brandis before he died." God I loved that show. I will never watch an episode of it, in order to preserve my pre-adolescent love of it. But if I ever do, I have no doubt that Scheider won't let me down. And yes, in Seaquest, he got a bigger boat.
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