Robert Shaw

Robert Archibald Shaw was born on 9 August 1927 and cut his teeth in postwar British theatre, joining the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and then the Old Vic in 1951, working through Macbeth, Henry VIII, Cymbeline. By 1959 he was headlining the West End. He shifted into film and earned an Academy Award nomination for playing Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons in 1966. The 1970s brought his most indelible screen work: the mobster Doyle Lonnegan in The Sting, the grizzled shark hunter Quint in Jaws, plus turns in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and Robin and Marian. He also wrote - his novel The Sun Doctor won the 1962 Hawthornden Prize, and his play The Man in the Glass Booth earned a Tony nomination and became a 1975 film. Shaw died on 28 August 1978, three weeks past his fifty-first birthday.