It's hard to picture Roy Scheider at the age of 75, which is what he was when he died this week (Feb 10th).
I encountered him twice in New York, for interview, and both times he was the lean, wiry, tanned figure with the broken nose (from a Golden Gloves tournament) who became so familiar to moviegoers. This is all the more remarkable, since the two occasions were separated by more than a decade.
The second was in 1980, the time of the release of All That Jazz (terrible title), Bob Fosse's semi-autobiographical musical about a director-choreographer killing himself with overwork, pharmaceutical stimulants and sexual shenanigans (which were exactly what would indeed end Fosse's own life just seven years later).
Scheider came into his neighbourhood restaurant, the Three Guys, at Madison and 75th on the Upper East Side. It was 9.30am, and he was wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts because each morning he ran a mile and a half in Central Park, and he worked out regularly at Kouvnovsky's gym in midtown.
Without him having to order, the waiter brings a Danish, two cups of coffee and a fistful of Sweet'n'Low. Scheider sticks a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and you're reminded of the frequent comparisons to Jean-Paul Belmondo. We talk amiably for an hour or so, for amiability was one of Roy Scheider's virtues - no movie star airs.
There is no particular reason for him to meet me. All That Jazz has not been boffo box-office (people tend to like their musicals to be about life, not death), and an interview in an Irish newspaper is not going to help that. But he talks easily about the role of Joe Gideon in the movie, and how Fosse struggled to make the notoriously clean-cut and neat actor more frazzled-looking.
"He wanted me to really look like a bag of shit. I was so pale, I was so thin. I couldn't look bad enough to suit him. He would come by and say 'Put more red in the eyes' or 'More sweat. Your hair looks too good'.
"My wife [ his first spouse, Cynthia] would laugh and say: 'Doesn't he know it's impossible to make you look messy?' But the studio hated all that stuff about death in the picture. They hated all the ironies, all the guts, of the movie. They were only interested in the entertainment value.
"Whereas Fosse, a guy who has always been obsessed with the idea of death, for him it was a chance to get it all out of his system, his ideas about failing and succeeding, and sometimes pushing yourself so hard that you're flirting constantly with the danger of just putting yourself away."
Maybe now one of the TV channels will rerun All That Jazz. It's one of my best-liked backstage film musicals, with a stunning closing production number, even though it introduced the cant expression "It's showtime, folks!" into the vernacular.
Looking back over his career, Roy Scheider told me that morning in the Three Guys that in 1964 he had played an IRA officer in Behan's The Hostage at the Arena Theatre in Washington DC, and in 1968 won an Obie in an off-Broadway production of Hugh Leonard's Stephen D (his mother, incidentally, was Irish, a Crosson).
I didn't know those things about him in spring 1969 when I went to talk to him in his apartment on West End Avenue. I was researching a class paper on "The Alien Actor Problem on Broadway" and wanted to find out about the American Actors Committee (AAC). Again, there was no publicity dividend in the interview for him - it wasn't going to be published. But his welcome was still warm.
Then, he was a little-known stage actor, struggling like the rest of them, the start of his successful movie career still some way ahead (Klute, The French Connection, both 1971). "I was a face in Klute, just a face," he was to tell me self-deprecatingly in 1980. Even after Connection, he hadn't quite registered in Hollywood. "Those guys in Los Angeles thought Hackman was the actor and I was a real cop. I think that was one of the reasons I got the Best Supporting Actor nomination, because they couldn't believe I was a real actor." In the Sixties the problem was that Broadway producers were importing package productions, including casts, from overseas - the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Comédie Française - and the native actors weren't getting work. So Scheider led a high-visibility campaign under the banner of the AAC, demonstrating, picketing, even succeeding in closing down some of the theatres for a few nights. The tactic paid off. Eventually a deal was reached whereby American actors would get work in Europe in exchange for permitting the Broadway curtain to go up on the readymade overseas companies.
In spite of his screen success, Roy Scheider retained that old allegiance to the legitimate theatre. After All That Jazz wrapped he would return to the stage, in a production of Harold Pinter's Betrayal with Blythe Danner and Raul Julia. The Drama League of New York recognised him with an award for distinguished performance.
"Theatre is how you learn to be a real actor," he told me that day.
"When you've handled Molière and Shakespeare and Jonson, movie acting is like dessert. It requires a certain other kind of concentration, but the themes are trivial compared to what you do in the legitimate theatre."