Roy Scheider in a scene from Jaws

Little Rock (Arkansas), Feb. 11 (AP): Roy Scheider, a two-time Oscar nominee best known for his role as a police chief in the blockbuster movie Jaws, has died. He was 75.

Scheider died yesterday at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences hospital in Little Rock, hospital spokesman David Robinson said. The hospital did not release a cause of death.

However, hospital spokeswoman Leslie Taylor said Scheider had been treated for multiple myeloma at the hospital's Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy for the past two years. Multiple myeloma is a cancer that affects plasma cells.

He was nominated for a best-supporting actor Oscar in 1971's The French Connection in which he played the police partner of Oscar winner Gene Hackman and for best-actor for 1979’s All That Jazz, the autobiographical Bob Fosse film.

However, he was best known for his role in Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film, Jaws, the enduring classic about a killer shark terrorising beachgoers and well as millions of moviegoers.

Widely hailed as the film that launched the era of the Hollywood blockbuster, it was also the first movie to earn $100 million at the box office. Scheider starred with Richard Dreyfuss, who played an oceanographer.

In 2005, one of Scheider’s most famous lines in the movie — “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” — was voted No. 35 on the American Film Institute's list of best quotes from US movies. That year, some 30 years after Jaws premiered, hundreds of movie buffs flocked to Martha’s Vineyard, off the southeastern coast of Massachusetts, to celebrate the great white shark.

Dreyfuss recalled yesterdayday a time during the filming of Jaws when Scheider disappeared from the set. As the filming was on hold because of the weather, Scheider “called me up and said: ‘You don’t know where I am if they call’.

“He’d gone to get a tan. He was really very tan-addicted. That was due to a childhood affliction where he was in bed for a long time. For him being tan was being healthy”, Dreyfuss said.

He added that Scheider “was a pretty civilised human being — you can’t ask for much more than that”.