Prize Fight: Inside an Oscar Family Feud

Rod Steiger earned a best actor Oscar and other major awards for his iconic performances in films like In the Heat of the Night. His daughter believed they were hers to inherit — until she stumbled upon several of his totems suddenly up for sale. Blaming her stepsister, she's now on a mission to reclaim them — and Steiger's lost legacy

- Gary Baum

Anna Steiger, an acclaimed mezzosoprano opera singer based in London and Paris, first surmised she'd been deceived after having a look last fall at Sir Laurence Olivier's prosthetic nose from Richard III. It was on sale at the Hollywood auction house Julien's. A friend thought it'd be of interest since her mother, British actress Claire Bloom, had co-starred in the 1955 film.

“Just by sheer chance, I thought, ‘I wonder if there’s anything of my father’s there, too,’” Steiger recalls. Her father being Rod Steiger, the Method acting icon best known for his role as police chief Bill Gillespie opposite Sidney Poitier in the 1967 film In the Heat of the Night. “And sure enough, a number of his things — which should’ve been my things,” she contends — “were being sold.” This included his Berlin Bear statuette for 1964’s The Pawnbroker, in which he played the title character, and his David Di Donatello award from the Academy of Italian Cinema for his starring turn in the controversial 1968 gay military drama The Sergeant.

The Academy Award for best actor that Steiger won for In the Heat of the Night wasn’t up for sale — Oscar rules forbid that. But Anna, 65, believes the other awards are rightfully her inheritances and were peddled by her stepsister to Julien’s following the death of Rod’s fifth and final wife, actress Joan Benedict, best known for playing Edith Fairchild on General Hospital.

Since then, Anna has embarked on a quixotic mission to pursue the objects. “It reminds me of Gianni Schicchi,” she says, referring to the Puccini comic opera inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is about an inheritance battle. “Except so far, there’s no finality.”