After serving in the South Pacific during World War II, he began his acting career with television roles in 1947, and went on to garner critical acclaim for his portrayal of the main character in the teleplay "Marty" (1953).

In the Heat of the Night (1967) won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Steiger, who was lauded for his performance as a Mississippi police chief who learns to respect an African-American officer (Poitier) as they search for a killer.

[41] 1953 proved to be Steiger's breakthrough year; he garnered Sylvania Awards for Marty and four other best performances of the year—as Vishinsky and Rudolf Hess in two episodes of You Are There, as gangster Dutch Schultz in a thriller, and as a radar operator in My Brother's Keeper.

[24][a] In a 1999 interview with BBC News, Steiger said he probably would not have done On the Waterfront if he'd known at the time that Kazan had provided the House Un-American Activities Committee with names of performers suspected of being Communists.

[52] Steiger portrayed a disturbed, emotionally isolated version of Jud, which television channel Turner Classic Movies (TCM) believed brought a "complexity to the character that went far beyond the stock musical villain".

[56] Steiger earned critical acclaim later that year for a role as a prosecuting major in Otto Preminger's The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, alongside Gary Cooper and Charles Bickford.

The first was John Farrow's film noir The Unholy Wife, in which he played a wealthy Napa Valley vintner who marries a femme fatale named Phyllis (Diana Dors).

In its original review of the film, The New York Times described Steiger's performance as "curious" further stating that the actor's voice modulation "ranges from Marlon Brando to Ronald Colman and back".

[66] Paul Beckley of the Herald Tribune had thought Steiger "superbly laconic",[67] but Dennis Schwartz dismissed the film as "an ill-conceived attempt" with "too many coincidences and contrived plot points to sustain interest".

[68] The following year, Steiger appeared with Claire Bloom (whom he later married) in a Fay and Michael Kanin stage production of Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film, Rashomon, where he enacted the role of the bandit originally played by Toshiro Mifune.

Robert Coleman of the Daily Mirror described Steiger's performance as "magnificently animalish", while Kenneth Tynan of The New Yorker thought the acting helped set new standards for Broadway.

[74] Following the success of Al Capone, Steiger played sophisticated thief Paul Mason, who masterminds a caper to steal $4 million in French francs from the underground vault of the casino of Monte Carlo, in the Henry Hathaway heist film Seven Thieves (1960).

[75] Bosley Crowther of The New York Times gave a positive review of the film, praising the "nerve-rackingly delicate plot" and the "most elaborate roles" of Steiger and his co-star, Edward G.

[79] In 1962, Steiger appeared on Broadway in Moby Dick—Rehearsed, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre,[80] as well as playing a detective searching for a scientist's (Alan Ladd) mugger in Philip Leacock's 13 West Street for Columbia Pictures.

A stereotypical Southern racist, he jumps to the conclusion that the culprit is Virgil Tibbs (Poitier), an African-American man passing through town after visiting his mother, who later turns out to be an experienced homicide detective from Philadelphia.

The film deals with the way the two men interact and join forces in solving the crime, as Steiger's Gillespie learns to greatly respect the black man he initially took to be a criminal.

[24] During the course of the film, he adopts various disguises, including those of an Irish priest, a New York City policeman, a German plumber, and a gay hairdresser, to avoid being identified, and to put his victims at ease, before strangling them and painting a pair of lips on their foreheads with garish red lipstick.

[120] In 1971, Steiger played a chauvinistic big game hunter, explorer and war hero opposite Susannah York in Mark Robson's Happy Birthday, Wanda June,[121] before agreeing to star alongside James Coburn as Mexican bandit Juan Miranda in Sergio Leone's Duck, You Sucker!, which was alternatively titled A Fistful of Dynamite.

[125] Steiger played a rural Tennessee patriarch and father of Jeff Bridges, at odds with Robert Ryan's character, in Lolly-Madonna XXX (1973), which received mixed reviews.

[144] Steiger revisited his role as Mussolini in Lion of the Desert, a production that was financed by Muammar Gaddafi, and which co-starred Anthony Quinn as Bedouin tribal leader Omar Mukhtar, fighting the Italian army in the years leading up to World War II.

[146] Later in 1981, Steiger won the Montréal World Film Festival Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of white-bearded Orthodox rabbi Reb Saunders in Jeremy Kagan's The Chosen.

[147][148] Janet Maslin commented that Steiger's "slow, rolling delivery" was more "numbing than prepossessing",[149] though a critic from Variety thought it an "exceptional performance as the somewhat tyrannical but loving patriarch".

[155] In 1984, Steiger starred as a detective assigned to investigate the murder of a Chicago psychoanalyst (Roger Moore), a man whom he detests from a previous case, in Bryan Forbes's The Naked Face.

[169] Steiger portrayed a reverend living in a small town in the American South in the macabre Merchant Ivory film production The Ballad of the Sad Café (1991), co-starring Vanessa Redgrave and Keith Carradine.

[172] The following year, Steiger agreed to play the role of a Cuban mob boss opposite Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone in Luis Llosa's thriller The Specialist, citing its purpose as a "$40 million commercial" to show a new generation that he existed.

[178] In 1997, Steiger played Tony Vago, the mob boss of Vincent Gallo's character in Kiefer Sutherland's Truth or Consequences, N.M., a gritty noir about a drug heist gone wrong.

[179] Steiger played judges in Antonio Banderas's comedy-drama Crazy in Alabama and in the prison drama, The Hurricane,[180][181] both in 1999, the latter of which tells the story of former middleweight boxer Rubin Carter, who was wrongly convicted of a triple homicide in a bar in Paterson, New Jersey.

[193] It upset him greatly when his marriage with Bloom ended in 1969 and that she quickly remarried Broadway producer Hillard Elkins the same year, a man whom Steiger had entrusted to care for her while he was away shooting Waterloo.

"[16] For example, Heston published a column Los Angeles Times saying that he was shocked that the American Film Institute had not honored Elia Kazan, who had cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee and named several Communists.

[205] A 1960 publication by Dean Jennings of The Saturday Evening Post referred to Steiger as an "angry, hot-tempered newcomer of prodigious acting talents, [who] works best only at emotional white heat", and remarked that he found it "stimulating to carry theatrical fantasy into his private life".