INTERVIEW: With ‘Jaws’ turning 50, Christopher Shaw Myers looks back at his ‘historic’ family
Photo: From left, Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider, Steven Spielberg and Richard Dreyfuss laugh it up on the set of Jaws. Photo courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC / Provided by Kensington Publishing Corp. with permission.
This weekend, June 20-22, the place to be for Jaws fans looking to celebrate the movie’s 50th anniversary is Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, where the Steven Spielberg blockbuster was originally filmed. A host of actors, shark experts and Jaws aficionados will be on hand to meet fans, tell stories, play some music and maybe even smash a beer can on their forehead.
One of the distinguished guests of the weekend is Christopher Shaw Myers, nephew of Robert Shaw, who play the grizzled shark hunter Quint in the iconic movie. There’s a lot of love for Richard Dreyfuss’ Matt Hooper and Roy Scheider’s Chief Brody, but Quint is in a class of his own.
Myers will be in Martha’s Vineyard signing his newly released biography, Robert Shaw: An Actor’s Life on the Set of Jaws and Beyond, which is now available from Kensington Publishing Corp. In the book, Myers not only tells his uncle’s cinematic story, but also the story of Shaw’s childhood, which includes tales of Myers’ own mother, Dr. Joanna Shaw.
The book project began a decade ago when Myers thought it was a good idea to write down some stories about his mother, who is Robert’s younger sister. There were five siblings in the Shaw family, and Myers’ mother is the middle child, with Robert being the oldest.
“They were best friends in life,” Myers said in a recent phone interview. “Robert and my mother at the ages of 5 and 7 began reading the same books together so that they could talk about them together, and that continued all through their youth, their teenage years. As teenagers, they were reading all the classics like Dickens and Jane Austen and all the great writers, and always sort of taking them apart. They were literary, very academically-oriented.”
Myers remembers turning to his mother 10 years ago and saying, “Hey, I’d like to write your memoir.” The immediate response was, “No, nobody will be interested.” Myers had to convince her that her life was worth putting down in book form. There was a lot of humor and success, but also some heartbreak, especially when the Shaw children were young.
“Their father was an alcoholic who killed himself,” Myers said about their traumatic childhood. “Their mother was a very severe, regal British woman who aspired to be part of the upper-class and had married into the upper-class, not realizing that her husband was a very troubled man, and when he died, they became paupers. And then World War II started, so there’s all these things that happened to them in their childhood. So I took my mother through that.”
In addition to those difficult events, Joanna was one of the first women to attend Cambridge University. She earned a doctoral degree in English literature and became a professor. She traveled to South Africa to fight apartheid and met with Nelson Mandela. Joanna eventually moved to the United States and raised seven children, including Myers.
“I said, ‘And by the way, your brother, Robert Shaw, you know him better than anybody. He’s pretty famous, and you were on the set of Jaws and saw what happened behind the cameras. That’s an interesting story,'” Myers said. “So she agreed, and the more she talked about Robert and their upbringing, the more I realized I had an interesting story about an interesting historic figure. And I would say Robert is a historic figure in a couple of senses. One is as an actor and as Quint in an iconic movie, a James Bond villain and all of that, Henry VIII. He was a key figure in a couple Academy Award winners, A Man for All Seasons and The Sting, but secondly he was a prolific author. He wrote five novels, three plays. Two of his works were turned into movies.”
Myers added: “It came together as a biography of him, but it’s also about his upbringing, his family that he grew up with, and what was it about the Shaw family that created such an interesting actor, writer and personality.”
Nat Segaloff, a writer known for The Exorcist Legacy, read an early copy of Myers’ book and offered a blurb for the back cover: “Go for the Jaws, stay for the Shaws.” This rhyming sentence, in Myers’ mind, is a perfect summary of his new nonfiction book.
“It does capture exactly what I think is interesting about the book,” he said. “People will be drawn into Jaws, and then they’ll see that Robert and his mother and siblings were fascinating people.”
The book definitely details the rough childhood experienced by Robert, Joanna and the other siblings. Myers remembers a quote his uncle apparently used to say about difficult upbringings: “Anybody who claims to have had a happy childhood must have had a very boring childhood because nothing ever happened to them.”
Whether this childhood strife inspired his uncle’s later performances and writing, Myers does not know. Robert was an actor from a young age and seems destined to have been a performer and artist of some kind.
“He was drawn to acting and to writing at a very young age, before any of the real trauma occurred in his life,” the writer said. “He started acting at 8 years old in the Orkney Islands where they were living at the time. Those are remote islands off the northern coast of Scotland, very barren, windswept islands. A traveling group of troubadours came through the town, charged a penny or two for a children’s show in the afternoon, and this was back in the early 1930s. I think it was 5 pence or whatever it was for the adults in the evening, and Robert went up on stage and started clowning around and hamming it up. And the audience loved it. He was hooked on acting.”
Decades after this initial acting experience, Shaw would board the Orca boat to play what would become one of the most famous characters in the history of Hollywood.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Robert Shaw: An Actor’s Life on the Set of Jaws and Beyond, written by Christopher Shaw Myers, is now available. Click here for more information.
