Nephew Of ‘Jaws’ Actor To Speak At Chatham Orpheum

Who can forget that chilling scene from the iconic movie “Jaws” when the tough and “certifiable” shark-hunter Quint regales Police Chief Brody and shark expert Matt Hooper with a lurid description of the vicious shark attacks on those who survived the sinking of the USS Indianapolis during World War II?

 In his biography of his uncle, “Robert Shaw: An Actor’s Life on the Set of Jaws and Beyond” (Citadel Press, 2025), Christopher Shaw Myers tells us that Shaw, who played Quint, wrote that monologue with the aid of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder, whom he met up with at the Black Dog Tavern on Martha’s Vineyard one evening in the summer of 1974 during the filming of “Jaws.” The morning after Shaw enjoyed champagne with Wilder, he woke up hungover and jotted down the Indianapolis monologue that had vexed the film’s screenwriters.

 The point of Shaw’s monologue? For Quint, hunting sharks was personal.

 And director Steven Spielberg’s reaction when he heard Shaw deliver the monologue? “I believe we have our picture,” he said.

 Myers, who is a son of Shaw’s sister Joanna, will give a talk on his uncle and “Jaws” prior to the Sunday, July 5 screening of “Jaws” at the Chatham Orpheum Theater. Myers’s talk consists of two parts — Robert Shaw’s “storied” acting career and the family circumstances that led to such an extraordinary personality, and secondly what makes “Jaws” a classic.

 Myers, who lives in Fairfield County, Conn., with his wife Colleen, was born and raised in Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of Trinity College and Columbia University. After retiring from a 30-year career in the high-tech field, he had time to delve into his family’s history. When he was a child, he often heard the actor and his siblings swapping tales about their formative years in Scotland and England. “Robert Shaw” is Myers’s first book.

 “This is not your traditional biography,” Myers said in an email interview last week. “It is more of a family memoir, including information about Robert Shaw’s parents and siblings. My belief is that a) the Shaw family is fascinating in their own right, and b) you cannot truly understand Robert Shaw without understanding his family, especially the very strong women who surrounded him.”

 One of those strong women was Myers’s mother, Joanna, to whom Shaw was “extremely close. As children, they read the same books together so they could discuss and dissect them.

 “Before they had families, Robert would sleep in the bathtub whenever Joanna visited, so she could have his bed,” Myers says. “Later in life, Robert offered to pay for Joanna’s Ph.D. when she told him she needed it to advance in her career but could not afford it. That was the type of person Robert was — loyal to a fault, always ready to help family and friends whenever they needed it.”

 Shaw was born in Lancashire, England, in 1927, the oldest of five children, all delivered by their father Thomas, a doctor. Shaw grew up in Orkney, Scotland and later in Cornwall. One problem was that Thomas became a drunk, disappearing sometimes from lunchtime until late at night. He eventually died by mixing morphine with alcohol. The book opens at an inquest in the winter of 1940 with Shaw’s mother Doreen on the witness stand and a judge asking her if she murdered her husband. Eventually Thomas’s death was ruled a suicide.

 Shaw began acting around the end of World War II, and Myers chronicles his early career in the theater, primarily in Shakespearian roles. Shaw was also a writer and the author of several novels and the play “The Man in the Glass Booth.” But it may be for his role as Quint in “Jaws” that he is best remembered today. In “Robert Shaw” Myers takes us onto the set of “Jaws” when Joanna, and his cantankerous grandmother, who one actor dubbed “scarier than the shark,” visited Shaw.

 As for intrigue on the set, Shaw’s relatives got their fill. It is well known that Richard Dreyfuss and Shaw did not get along. One day during filming Dreyfuss accused Shaw of being drunk, which Shaw admitted. When Shaw asked Dreyfuss to hold his flask, Dreyfuss tossed it into the ocean. It turned out that the flask was a gift from Paul Newman, who gave it to Shaw when they wrapped up shooting on “The Sting.”

 Three years after “Jaws” was released, Shaw died of a heart attack on the side of a road in Ireland. He was just 51 that August of 1978. The family was somber after the funeral, but then they began swapping stories and laughing. “The odd thing about Robert was that he did not laugh very much. He made others laugh,” Myers writes.

 “Jaws” will play at the Chatham Orpheum Theater through July 9. On Sunday, July 5 at 6:30 p.m. Myers will sign copies of “Robert Shaw” in the Orpheum’s lobby. At 7 p.m. Myers will speak about his uncle, with a screening of “Jaws” following. Tickets are $20 and available in advance through chathamorpheum.org.