Robert Shaw is a remembered character actor who was characterized by playing charismatic secondary and antagonistic characters.
Robert Shaw's surly and athletic physique, the result of his sports education in rugby, served to give him a scholarship and travel to Cambridge, where he would fail in his medical career; This situation led him to one of his hidden passions, acting, where he would be part of a theater company, giving up his scholarship and traveling throughout the country representing Shakespeare's works.
Coming from a tragic family (his father committed suicide with an opium overdose when he was 12 years old), Shaw's life would also be related to excesses, suffering from alcoholism and drug addiction throughout his career, states that influenced his subsequent suicide. of his second wife, also an actress Mary Ure, from an overdose of barbiturates and his own very early death at age 51, three years after his most memorable performance under the orders of Steven Spielberg.
Nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA, Shaw would complete a career of 65 performances between film and television, where the sea seems to have been a constant, first positioning himself on the small screen in the series The Buccaneers (1956-1957 ), years before landing his first well-known film role alongside James Bond in From Russia with Love (1963).
Question of destiny Shaw first turned down the role of the villain Grant in Russia with Love, however, his wife convinced him to take it as it would help his film career. Later, being a big fan of the Bond movies, Steven Spielberg was convinced to cast Shaw as the captain of Jaws.
Nominated for an Oscar in 1966 for that year's winning film, A Man For All Seasons, Shaw would become the third actor nominated for playing King Henry VIII. The first would be Charles Laughton before him and later Richard Burton.
In his role as the mobster and villain Doyle Lonnegan in the also Oscar-winning best film, The Sting (1973), Shaw would incorporate his severe knee injury as a mark and essential part of the character.
Robert was not the first choice to play Quint in Jaws. The first was Lee Marvin, who turned down the role; the second was Sterling Hayden, who due to scheduling problems had to let it go. Although he too initially turned it down, Shaw agreed after Spielberg's insistence.
In Jaws, the tension between Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss was real. The actors couldn't stand each other off the set having constant yelling and arguing with each other.
Not having a basic script, Shaw improvised almost all of his dialogue in Jaws (1975), including the parts when he sings "Spanish Ladies", which he also sang in an episode of the series The Buccaneers, called The Ladies in 1956.
Robert Shaw spent almost the entire filming of Jaws in a drunken state. His co-star Roy Schreider describes him as a sober gentleman, but a true son of a bitch under the influence of alcohol. Spielberg had a lot of problems filming at sea due to this series of incidents, dealing with the actor's arrogance and forgetting lines, however...
The famous USS Indianapolis monologue was rewritten 3 times until Robert made it his own and improvised after he asked Spielberg for permission to make some modifications. Likewise, the first time the actor was filmed he was totally intoxicated, causing the anger of the director and his co-stars, however, that same night Shaw asked for a second chance and the next day, in a single shot, the actor with his notes and improvising it almost entirely, prosecuted one of the greatest moments in cinema. Years later Dreyfuss and Schreider confessed that their interest shown on the screen was real due to the dark interpretation of his partner.
Sean Connery and Robert Shaw would again be adversaries when in Robin and Marian (1976). The former Bond would be Robin Hood and Shaw the Sheriff of Nottingham.
Shaw would die of a heart attack while driving with his third wife on a highway in Ireland. According to Virginia Janse's testimony, Shaw was in pain and got out of the car for a walk, but after four or five steps he collapsed and was pronounced dead after fifteen minutes.
