The fraternity of actors who are forever identified with a particular, memorable line is a small one, and I often wonder how the members of that exclusive club feel about being so strongly associated with a single sentence uttered in the course of a single job. Did Bogie ever get tired of people shouting, “here’s lookin’ at you, kid!” from across the street? Did Brando cringe whenever some two-bit impressionist would “make somebody an offer they can’t refuse?” And has even The Governator gotten tired of “I’ll be back?” (Probably not, in the latter case.)

This question is on my mind because I’m wondering what Roy Scheider — who died yesterday at the age of 75 after a long struggle with cancer — would say about the fact that every obituary I’ve read today has referenced his famous dead-pan quip from Jaws: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

I hope he’d be amused by it, and maybe even proud. Jaws still holds up today, 33 years after its release, as a terrific adventure film — it’s not a horror movie, despite what most people think — due in no small part to Scheider’s contribution. His character, Chief Brody, is the Everyman, the non-expert, the guy the audience identifies with, because he doesn’t know anything and he’s terrified, just like we would be in the same situation. It makes the movie much more believable than it would be if Brody was some kind of uber-competent cartoon character, and that ultimately makes the film more effective in squeezing our adrenal glands.

Scheider was like a lot of actors who came along in the mid-70s: good-looking, but not exceptionally handsome, regular joes who usually played ordinary working-class guys. We don’t have many actors like that these days — it seems like most of them nowadays are far too concerned with being a star, or a hero, or at least cool, to play anything so prosaic as just a guy. That wasn’t Roy. He was a guy in great movie after great movie: The French Connection, Blue Thunder, 2010: The Year We Make Contact (yeah, I like that one, so what?)… he was even a regular guy (and the most appealing aspect of) that television abortion called SeaQuest DSV. (I’ve never seen All That Jazz, the other big Scheider movie that many bloggers and journalists are mentioning today, and in which I gather Roy was anything but a regular guy. Hey, I didn’t say he couldn’t play more exotic roles, only that the stuff I remember him for was the blue-collar characters.)

Of all the regular guys he played, though, it’s that small-town New England sheriff and his battle with a mechanical shark named Bruce that I think is really going to endure, and if I were Roy Scheider, I’d have been fine with that. Jaws is one of my favorite movies; Roy Scheider was one of my favorite actors for having been in it. I hope he got that bigger boat in the end.