Quint's ghost: Robert Shaw resurrected in The Shark Is Broken

RTÉ News​

13-05-2025

There's a common misconception that the credit and blame for blockbuster cinema rests with Star Wars. That the classic movie age died on May 4th 1977, with the release of George Lucas' space opera upon an unsuspecting public. As far as the Hollywood studios were concerned it didn't happen until the following November, with the release of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Only then did they realise Star Wars wasn't an anomaly: it was a trend. The greenlighting of big-budget bombastic spectacle cinema began in earnest, and arguably has never ceased.
In retrospect, it's clear the die was cast two years earlier, when a cloud appeared on the horizon of the beautiful resort community of Amity ('Amity' means 'friendship, you know). A cloud in the shape of a killer shark. The term 'blockbuster' had been around long before the release of Jaws; but it became cemented in the public lexicon forever after the summer of 1975, when people queued around the clock and around the block several times to watch - nay..experience Steven Spielberg's cinematic rollercoaster scarefest.
Watch the original trailer for Jaws
Honestly, I don't think it's possible to understate how popular Jaws remains to this day. Arguably, more than Star Wars, there is an all-inclusive, multi-generational love for this film. That's some achievement for one picture (the numbered sequels don't count). No TV shows, billion-dollar mini-series, prequel trilogies: just one two-hour movie. Despite their tidal wave of popularity, none of those franchises have inspired a play about their production. But Jaws has: The Shark Is Broken by Ian Shaw & Joseph Nixon opens at The Gaiety Theatre in Dublin on May 13th.
If, as they say, 'success has many fathers but failure is an orphan', the grandfather of Jaws' impact was Robert Shaw and his iconic performance as the gruff shark-hunter, Quint. A world war two veteran with a back-story as thick as his jaw. Shaw himself, a veteran British stage actor, was also the defining James Bond henchman in From Russia With Love, an Oscar-nominated king in A Man For All Seasons, and gave Newman and Redford a run for their money in The Sting. The man had been an intellectual and physical nemesis to some serious players. Now, out in Martha's Vineyard off the coast of Cape Cod, he would face his greatest challenge: boredom. For like the title says, the shark is broken - again. It was much of the time, going by the legend of the movie's production.
Watch: Ian Shaw on his play The Shark Is Broken
One man who heard these tales directly from the, well, shark's mouth: Robert's son, Ian Shaw, co-author of the play and starring on stage as his father, alongside Dan Fredenburgh as Roy Scheider and Ashly Margolis as Richard Dreyfuss. The elder Shaw was cast as Quint during a fallow period in his film career. Though never out of work, he took the stage more seriously, along with his writing (Shaw authored several best-selling novels during his life). Movies were a means to support his ten children (mostly from two marriages). During the movie's production, the broken shark's now minimal screen time worked in the film and Shaw's favour, with Quint's dark portents and foreboding monologues on land and sea, bringing a tangible primal fear to the now more often than not, invisible threat.
Watch: Richard Dreyfuss breaks down after meeting Robert Shaw's granddaughter on The Late Late Show, circa 2010
Shaw's personal nemesis had been alcohol. Being a writer, he kept drinking diaries. One of which, kept during the picture's production in 1974 and re-discovered a few years ago, inspired his son Ian to write the play and inhabited his father, whom he closely resembles.
The worldwide success of Jaws made Shaw a wanted man in Hollywood. Some of his post-shark films were pretty good, such as Black Sunday and Robin & Marion. The Deep and The Buccaneers, not so great. But his pay cheques were. This allowed him to take care of his extended family on his farm in Tourmakeady. Co. Mayo. Rober Shaw was barely fifty-one when he died from a heart attack driving home from the shops one afternoon in August of 1978. Spending much of his filmography playing intense, stoic, veteran men of war, sea, politics and whiskey, he was truly a man of all seasons. But in Jaws, a movie for the ages, I venture it's his grizzing Shark-hunting moustachioed Quint, who will be tying sheep-shanks in the audience's collective consciousness for as long as there is cinema. Singing "Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies… Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain… For we've received orders for to sail back to Boston… And so never more shall we see you again."