The film Jaws and its Co Mayo connection

Irish Times

3 days ago

Robert Shaw's untimely death was all the more tragic for having happened at a time when he finally looked like achieving peace of mind and financial security.
Shaw was just 51 when he suffered a heart attack at the wheel of his Range Rover on August 28th, 1978. He was with his third wife Virginia Jansen and the youngest of his 10 children, Thomas, aged one.
He passed a pleasant afternoon golfing and was driving from Castlebar to his home at Drimbawn House, his red brick mansion in Tourmakeady, Co Mayo.
The house, on the shores of Lough Mask, was once owned by the Jameson family of whiskey fame. He bought it in 1971 as a refuge to escape the clutches of the British Inland Revenue.
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Shaw had been in splendid form and thought he had heart palpitations. He got out of the car to walk it off. He had only taken a few paces when he collapsed again. A passing motorist turned around and drove back to the village to fetch the local doctor, Dr Frank Browne, but he was unable to revive the stricken actor.
Shortly before he died ,Shaw gave up the drink fearing he would die as his great hero Errol Flynn had done prematurely and from alcohol-related disease. 'He had no liver left at all. I decided I didn't want to go that way at that age.'
Sobriety came too late for Shaw. He drank a bottle of vodka every day before going on set for Force 10 from Navarone which finished shooting in early 1978. The script was so bad he wanted to quit acting, but needs must when you have 10 children, an expensive house to run and a sizeable tax bill. 'To fulfil my obligations I've taken roles and spoken lines that I would be ashamed to have written,' he once said.
He had the starring role in his last film Avalanche Express. By the time it was released in 1979 both he and the director Mark Robson were dead.
Shaw is best remembered as Quint in Jaws released on June 19th, 1975 with little fanfare and even less expectation. It is a peculiarity of that film that its leading man - Shaw was billed ahead of actor Roy Scheider who played Chief Brody - and its real star, the titular shark, hardly appear until the final half hour of the film.
We first meet him Quint scraping his nails down a blackboard to attract attention to himself while the mayor and locals deliberate on whether or not there really was a man-eating shark in the waters around Amity Island (real life Martha's Vineyard).
Quint is an Irish-American who had his head bashed in during a brawl on St Patrick's Day in Boston. He displays his war wound to 'college boy' shark expert Matt Hooper (played by Richard Dreyfuss) while they describe their respective war wounds from wrestling human being and man-eating fish.
Quint, the rule-breaking war veteran and shark hunter, and Hooper, the privileged graduate of the Oceanographic Institute, needled each other in real life as much as they did on screen. Shaw behaved like a 'demon' on set and would frequently taunt and tease him, Dreyfuss remembered.
He never knew if Shaw was being serious or just trying to get a better performance out of him, but, in any case, the dynamic worked perfectly on screen.
Shaw's son Ian, the image of his father, co-wrote a play, The Shark is Broken, in which he played his father and focuses on the relationship between the three human stars of the film. It was staged at the Gaiety Theatre in May in advance of the 50th anniversary of the release of Jaws this month.
The relationship between Dreyfuss and Shaw was only one of a smorgasbord of tribulations which affected the young and relatively unknown director Steven Spielberg. The mechanical shark, nicknamed Bruce, worked perfectly in a freshwater location, but in sea water, its rubber skin began to expand and distort and the mechanics short circuited.
As a consequence, the shark is only in shot for four minutes in total. The film is an hour old before we get the first sighting of the shark in all its horrific magnificence causing Schieder to improvise the most famous line in the film, 'You're going to need a bigger boat'.
Jaws made Shaw the leading man he always craved to be. He starred in Black Sunday (1977) and The Deep (1978) written by the author Peter Benchley who wrote the book on which the film was based.
He was edging closer to the financial independence which would have allowed him to fulfil his true ambition – to become a full-time writer.
Despite all the chaos in his life and his alcoholism, Shaw had written five novels in the 1960s, one, The Man in the Glass Booth, was successfully adopted for Broadway, but his film career became all-consuming.
He was penning a sixth, with the working title of The Ice Floe, when he died. 'When they write my obituary, I would like them to say, 'He was an author who wrote one book that will last and he was also a remarkable actor',' he once suggested.
For weeks afterwards telegrams and cars arrived at the Tourmakeady post office from around the world. Shaw was cremated in Belfast and his ashes scattered near his Irish home.
A stone chair was erected in the village to mark the 30th anniversary of his death. Speaking at its unveiling, Virginia said Shaw's Mayo home was his favourite place in the world: 'He just wanted to be himself. He wanted real life. Tourmakeady gave them that. He didn't like the razzmatazz of Hollywood.'