Roy Scheider 1932-2008

Roy Scheider, who has died at the age of 75, was best known for his starring role in Steven Spielberg's shark thriller, the film which ushered in the era of the blockbuster. But he was a versatile actor who was twice nominated for an Oscar Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar

The first of those nods came in 1971, when Scheider was on the best supporting list for The French Connection, in which he and Gene Hackman played street-smart New York narcotics detectives. Hackman took the best actor Oscar that year Photograph: Public domain

Jaws (1975), unlike the increasingly waterlogged sequels, was a character-based study in building tension. Scheider excelled as the police chief with the immortal line: 'You're gonna need a bigger boat' Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar

Scheider's second and final Oscar nomination came in 1979 for the pseudo-biopic All That Jazz, which was based on the Broadway experiences of its director Bob Fosse. Scheider played the Fosse character - womanising, drug-addled Joe Gideon - and would probably have taken the Academy Award for best actor if it hadn't been for Kramer vs Kramer's Dustin Hoffman Photograph: Public domain

Scheider was never quite as comfortable playing the straight-up action hero, but his experience playing paranoid cops with a distrust of the authorities served him well on the high-tech thriller Blue Thunder (1983) Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar

The following year, Scheider played Dr Heywood Floyd in 2010 (1984), the follow-up to Arthur C Clarke's genre-defining 2001: A Space Odyssey Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar

In 1986, he played a cheating husband turning the tables on his blackmailers in Elmore Leonard's 52 Pick-up Photograph: Cinetext/Allstar

Scheider's later years were not marked with huge critical success, as he settled into TV work and the occasional political thriller. John Frankenheimer's The Fourth War (1990) was an interesting departure, as the actor played a grizzled old army veteran conspiring with Jurgen Prochnow's Soviet colonel to heat up the Cold War on the border of west Germany and Czechoslovakia Photograph: Public domain