Rod Steiger

Rod Steiger played Sol Nazerman in Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker, a man whose family was taken to a concentration camp and who now runs a pawnshop in Spanish Harlem, numbed by the horror behind him and holding himself shut to every feeling. He was the actor the producers had in mind for the part from the start, and he signed in August 1963. The film was shown as the official United States entry at the Berlin Film Festival in June 1964, where Steiger took the Silver Bear for best actor; the same part was met at the Academy with a lead actor nomination. Later, in In the Heat of the Night, which Norman Jewison shot from John Ball's novel, he was the police chief Bill Gillespie: it drives him to fury that the man who turns up in his town proves to be a senior homicide detective, he takes the findings unwillingly, and as they work together a grumbling tolerance grows between them. One of the film's five Oscars went to his acting.