Rod Steiger Movies

Rod Steiger

Want to know the best Rod Steiger movies?  How about the worst Rod Steiger movies?  Curious about Rod Steiger box office grosses or which Rod Steiger movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Rod Steiger movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.

Rod Steiger (1925-2002) was an Oscar® winning American actor.  Steiger was noted for his portrayal of offbeat, often volatile and crazed characters.  He is also associated with “method acting”. His IMDb page shows 148 acting credits. This page will rank 44 Rod Steiger movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. His many television appearances, his international and movies never released in theaters were not included in the rankings.

Drivel part of the page:  This website is currently in the process of updating all of our pages from static to dynamic pages.  That update is pretty much taking all of our spare time.  That being said…we felt it was important to keep new material coming….so we looked at our recent requests….and saw that Bob had requested this page.

Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando in 1954’s On The Waterfront

Rod Steiger Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table

The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.

  • Sort Rod Steiger movies by co-stars of his movies.
  • Sort Rod Steiger movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort Rod Steiger movies by yearly domestic box office rank (based on movies in our database for the year the movie was made)
  • Sort Rod Steiger movies how they were received by critics and audiences.  60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
  • Sort by how many Oscar® nominations each Rod Steiger movie received and how many Oscar® wins each Rod Steiger movie won.
  • Sort Rod Steiger movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score.  UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
 

Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Rod Steiger Table

  1. Ten Rod Steiger movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark.  That is a percentage of 22.72% of his movies listed. Doctor Zhivago (1965) was easily his biggest box office hit when looking at adjusted domestic box office gross.
  2. An average Rod Steiger movie grosses $91.70 million in adjusted box office gross.
  3. Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter.  25 of Rod Steiger movies are rated as good movies…or 56.81% of his movies. On The Waterfront (1954) is his highest rated movie while The Specialist (1994) was his lowest rated movie.
  4. Eleven Rod Steiger movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 25.00% of his movies.
  5. Five Rod Steiger movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 11.36% of his movies.
  6. An average Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score is 40.00.  16 Rod Steiger movies scored higher than that average….or 37.50% of his movies. On The Waterfront (1954) got the the highest UMR Score while The Naked Face (1984) got the lowest UMR Score.

Rod Steiger in 1967’s In the Heat of the Night

Ten Possibly Interesting Facts About Rod Steiger

1. Rodney Stephen Steiger was born in Westhampton, New York in 1925.  Both of his parents were vaudevillians.

2. Rod Steiger dropped out of high school at age 16 and joined the Navy. He saw action during World War 2 in the Pacific on a destroyer.

3. After the war, Rod Steiger began his acting career with television roles in 1947, and went on to garner critical acclaim for his portrayal of the main character in the teleplay, Marty (1953).  Ernest Borgnine would win the Best Actor Oscar® for playing Marty when it reached theaters in 1955.

4. Behind the scenes trivia –  Most of the solo shots of Steiger during the famous taxicab scene in 1954’s On the Waterfront were done after Marlon Brando had left for the day. Brando had it in his contract that he could finish shooting before the normal quitting time so that he could make his daily session with his psychiatrist. Steiger was deeply hurt and annoyed at Brando’s rudeness and lack of courtesy to a fellow actor, as it was customary, in a two-shot, for an actor in close-up to be fed his lines by the other actor or for the other actor to just be there so the first actor would have him him or her to play to. Steiger used his negative emotions to enhance his performance, and though he paid tribute to Brando as a great actor, he personally loathed him thereafter. Director Elia Kazan stood in for Brando in the back of the cab so Steiger would have someone to emote to.

5. Rod Steiger was offered the title role in 1970’s Patton,  but refused the role, saying, “I’m not going to glorify war.” The role was then given to George C. Scott, who won the Oscar® for the role. Steiger calls this refusal his “dumbest career move”.

6. Rod Steiger’s favorite all-time movies was 1937’s The Good Earth starring Paul Muni.

7. Rod Steiger was married five times…..he had two children.

8. Rod Steiger was asked by director Norman Jewison to chew gum when playing the part of Gillespie in In The Heat of the Night.  He resisted at first but then grew to love the idea,and eventually went through 263 packs of gum during the shooting of the film.

9. Rod Steiger received one of his three Oscar® nominations for 1965’s The Pawnbroker.  If you ever watch The Pawnbroker…..keep a look out for a very young Morgan Freeman in his film debut.

10. Check out Rod Steiger’s career compared to current and classic actors.  Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.

And last but not least…check out Steve Lensman’s Rod Steiger You Tube Video.

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40 thoughts on “Rod Steiger Movies

  1. HI BRUCE
    1 Good take on Brando v his co-stars. His attitudes and conduct towards them were so contrasting that one is reminded of the little girl in the nursery rhyme who “When she was good she was very, very good but when she was bad she was horrid.”

    2 Mr. Mumbles’ side of the story about the Steiger quarrel apparently is that it arose largely out of Rod’s failure to discipline himself in that when they got to the part where Charley cries to Terry Rod couldn’t stop the tears and everybody had to cool their heels for lengthy periods while Rod brought himself back under control so naturally Mr. M ultimately became impatient to get off the set especially as it had taken 11 hours to shoot the scene according to Wiki.

    3 Whatever the truth behind their bickering though BOTH could nevertheless be proud of creating a scene that is regarded as one of most famous in postwar cinema and ironically many acting pairs who have been good friends when filming have been unable to produce anything close to it. I was pleased that both you and Steve included the still of it in your Steiger profiles.

    4 Yes usefully your WW table highlights that Julius Caesar’s foreign gross almost equalled its domestic one [$83/88 million respectively] which was at times rare in those days when as you and I have agreed overseas revenues were normally about jut half of domestic ones

    5 Thanks for your useful catch-up reply to my Maureen O’Hara post of March this year. I did enjoy my mini-vacation thanks and I was able to look in on this site regularly though I did not have access to facilities for commenting

    1. Hey Bob…..seems there are many sides to that store….but as the great George Costanza says…..”if you really believe it, then it is not a lie”….so maybe Steiger is guilty of that….or is Brando guilty of that….lol. Glad you enjoyed your mini-vacation. I am getting one of those this weekend…as we are headed South to pick up our Marine. Good feedback.

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