1945 The Portland-class cruiser USS Indianapolis was on a return voyage, having delivered critical parts for the atomic raid on Japan, 6 August. She was torpedoed and sunk in minutes by a Japanese submarine in the Philippine Sea.
For security reasons, there was strict radio silence. Three hundred men went down with the ship. Some 900 were left in the water, with no lifeboats – exposed to shark attacks – for three days. Only 316 were eventually rescued. It was the largest loss of life from a single vessel in the US Navy during the whole of the Second World War.
The disaster is memorialised in the 1975 film Jaws, in which Quint, in an edgy drinking scene on board the Orca, with Chief Brody and the marine biologist Hooper, recounts his experiences as an Indianapolis survivor.
Quint’s monologue is, with Orson Welles’ ‘cuckoo clock’ monologue in The Third Man, one of the most famous such moments in film. Both were the invention not of scriptwriters, nor the novelists (Peter Benchley, Graham Greene) from whom the film narratives were adapted, but composed by the actors themselves.
Robert Shaw’s Quint monologue can be heard and seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nrvMNf-HEg (It will be noted he gets the date wrong – June, not July.)
Shaw was born in Lancashire, the son of an alcoholic doctor who had married one of his nurses and killed himself with an overdose of opium when his son was twelve. Shaw taught for a while, after himself leaving school in Cornwall (whose regional accent is detectable, even under his assumed American accent), before studying at RADA. At school he excelled at sport and might – had his career gone differently – have been a professional rugby player. He would gravitate towards physical roles. He was also a novelist of great talent.
Like Richard Burton, Shaw could not afford to waste his considerable acting talent on the stage, where he made an early reputation in Shakespeare. His most commendable film role was as Aston, in the 1963 adaptation of Pinter’s The Caretaker. Notably memorable is the character’s extended monologue about the abusive effect of electro-convulsive therapy on his brain. Shaw’s name was made, and his career likewise, by his performance as the psychopathic SPECTRE assassin, Grant, in the James Bond film, From Russia with Love, which also came out in 1963.
Like Burton, Shaw enjoyed (if that’s the word) riotous sessions with fellow-drunk and screenwriter, Alistair MacLean. He died, on the set of a wholly undistinguished film, aged only 51, leaving a clutch of distinguished novels. ‘I would rather’, he once said, ‘go down as having written one good novel than be acclaimed as a great actor.’
It is as Quint, alas, that he is destined to be remembered on the innumerable TV re-runs of Steven Spielberg’s most popular film.