My friend told me (yeah I know – that’s where all the best info comes from) that the guy who played the old sea captain in Jaws alongside Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfus (I think his name was Robert… something-or-other) was a racist bigot.
Apparently he’d turn up on the set of the movie quite drunk and he’d begin his foul vocalizations at the other three (Director S.Spielberg, Scheider and Dreyfus), in particular bashing them on being Jewish.
I know what you’re thinking; “just Google dummy”.
Problem is, I sort of have this shark-phobia thing. If I see a pic of a Great White I start to get a li’l nervous. Silly me.
Robert Shaw.
Somehow it doesn’t seem likely that the man who wrote both the book and the play The Man in the Glass Booth (about an Adolph Eichmann-like character) was anti-Semitic.
I saw the E! True Hollywood Story about Jaws a few days ago. Both Roy and Richard seemed to treat the comments as drunken joking, and just tasteless ‘humor’. They didn’t seem to perceive him as being maliciously anti-semitic, just a bit on the crass side when it came to relating to other people.
I think it’s well known that Shaw was hard to get along with, and Dreyfuss in particular disliked him. The tension between Quint (Shaw) and Hooper (Dreyfuss) was not entirely just acting.
But an anti-Semite? I can’t find much evidence of that. Shaw of course wrote a very famous play, “The Man in the Glass Booth,” in which the main character (a Jew masquerading as a Nazi - it’s a weird story) spews forth much anti-Semitic invective, but that doesn’t make SHAW a Nazi.
Shaw was a professional in every way and very accomplished Hollywood actor. I have difficulty believing someone prone to drunken anti-Semitic outbursts would last in Hollywood as long as Shaw did.
I did some casual Googling on ‘“robert shaw” anti-semite jaws’ and ‘“robert shaw” anti-semitic jaws’ and found absolutely nothing to support this proposition. If this were a widespread rumor, I’d have expected to at least see some mention of it online.
(…on preview, everyone beat me to it. It sucks typing with a hand bandaged together.)
“Goddamned Jaws are in control of all the banks. You never hear about it, though, ‘cuz the bastards own the media, too! Fuckin’ giant sharks, makin’ it impossible for a good white Christian to earn a livin’ in this country.”
This is slightly OT but has anybody noticed that Shaw and all the other notable British/Irish actors of his generation (Richard Burton, Peter O’ Toole, Richard Harris, Oliver Reed, Alan Bates, Anthony Hopkins, etc.) were all alcoholics? I can’t think of anybody from that era in that group who didn’t have a serious drinking problem at one time during their careers (maybe Michael Caine and Sean Connery were exceptions).