Actor: Rod Steiger

Rod Steiger won Best Actor for In the Heat of the Night, playing a Mississippi police chief whose racism the film erodes gradually instead of resolving.

The Pawnbroker brought an earlier nomination, playing a Holocaust survivor in Harlem, and it is a performance of near-total interiority.

On the Waterfront gives him the taxi scene opposite Brando, and he was open that Brando left after his own coverage, leaving Steiger to act to an empty seat. He spoke publicly about clinical depression for decades.