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Jaws turns 50 this month, having premiered on June 20, 1975.

Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw led a cast rounded out by Martha's Vineyard locals.

Director Steven Spielberg and author Peter Benchley both expressed regret over how the film contributed to the demonization of great white sharks.

In the half-century since its release, Steven Spielberg's seminal Jaws has been celebrated, parodied, imitated, mythologized, and even demonized, with many — including Spielberg himself — blaming the film for the decimation of the shark population.

That, of course, doesn't change the fact that its a thrilling, terrifying time at the movies. Its story of a great white shark terrorizing Amity Island returns to the big screen summer after summer, routinely enticing new generations to dip a toe into its haunted waters.

Fans (and detractors) are acknowledging the 1975 film's 50-year anniversary in a variety of ways. A new documentary, Jaws @ 50, will air on National Geographic in July before streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.

You can enjoy it between commemorative events on Martha's Vineyard, Mass., if you like, perhaps with a chilled glass of Jaws Amity Island Red in hand. (You could also take after the 55-year-old swimmer who recently embarked on a 12-day, 60-mile swim around the island of Martha's Vineyard to "highlight the perilous plight of sharks around the world," though we wouldn't recommend it.)

As Spielberg himself told Entertainment Weekly in a 2011 interview, Jaws was hell to make. "I lost my confidence, but I didn’t lose my drive to make as good a movie as I possibly could," he said, citing the ocean shoot and malfunctioning mechanical shark. "But I had lost my confidence, and I had lost control of the production. I have never lost control of a production before, and not since either."

Still, its legacy lives on. The same goes for the cast — while many of the film's Hollywood stars and local players have since died, their performances are in no danger of disappearing. In celebration of Jaws' 50th anniversary, we're taking a look at the lives and careers of its stars in the half-century since its release.

01 of 11

Roy Scheider as Chief Martin Brody

Roy Scheider as Chief Brody in 'Jaws'; Scheider at 'The Myth of Fingerprints' premiere in 1997.

Universal/Courtesy Everett; Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty

Roy Scheider had already appeared in some of the best movies of the '70s (Klute, The French Connection, Marathon Man) before landing the role of Jaws' Martin Brody, Amity Island's noble police chief and deliverer of the oft-(mis)quoted, "You're gonna need a bigger boat."

Though filmmaker William Friedkin would later lament to EW that the actor "became difficult" following the success of Jaws, Scheider remained a reliable player in film and on TV up until his death in 2008, balancing work with acclaimed filmmakers including Paul Schrader (Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters), David Cronenberg (Naked Lunch), and Francis Ford Coppola (The Rainmaker) with TV gigs on seaQuest DSV (1993–1996) and Family Guy (2007–2009).

Most notable, however, was Scheider's turn as Bob Fosse in the Fosse-directed All That Jazz (1979), an electric and athletic turn that scored him his second Academy Award nomination, as well as nods from the Golden Globes and BAFTAs. Speaking with EW, Friedkin called it "one of the finest performances by an American actor in a movie."

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Scheider maintained a fondness for Jaws throughout his life, reprising his role for the 1978 sequel, Jaws 2, and narrating a documentary, The Shark Is Still Working(2012).

As The Shark Is Still Working producer J. Michael Roddy told EW ahead of its release, Scheider remained close with the residents of Martha's Vineyard, where Jaws was filmed, and helped connect the documentarians with locals.

“Roy was an amazingly generous man,” Roddy told us. “He said, ‘What do you need?’ and that opened a lot of doors for us. Then we said, 'Let’s shoot for the stars. Let’s really make this as exhaustive as possible. Let’s track down the stories that we haven’t heard. We’re doing this for the fans, by the fans.' We wanted to make the documentary we always wanted to see. So no stone was left unturned.”

Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider, and Robert Shaw in 'Jaws'.

Universal Studios/Courtesy of Getty

All they needed was a narrator, and Roddy and his fellow producers had some great voices in mind. They checked in with Scheider, who was sick with cancer, and asked his opinion about a few names they were bouncing back and forth. “And he was like, ‘Well, what about me?’ And it clicked,” says Roddy. “Here’s the man that was our gateway. He’s our Everyman. We took his journey on Jaws. Why not let him take us on this journey on the impact and legacy of Jaws?”

Just four months after recording the narration, Scheider lost his battle with multiple myeloma in February 2008. He was 75.

02 of 11

Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper

Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper in 'Jaws'; Dreyfuss at the TCM Classic Film Festival in 2023.

Universal/Courtesy Everett; Presley Ann/Getty

Richard Dreyfuss was still early in his career when he played marine biologist Matt Hooper in Jaws, having made waves two years earlier in George Lucas' American Graffiti (1973).

In 1977, he turned in two of his most-acclaimed performances in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the Neil Simon-penned The Goodbye Girl, the latter of which won him an Oscar, a BAFTA, and a Golden Globe. He would go on to score another Academy Award nomination for his dramatic turn in Mr. Holland's Opus (1995).

Throughout his 50-year career, Dreyfuss has pivoted between drama (Stand By Me, Always), comedy (What About Bob?, The American President), family fare (James and the Giant Peach), and social commentary (W., Madoff). He even slipped on an apron for a 2020 charity edition of The Great British Bake Off.

In 2023, Dreyfuss made headlines for remarks he made after seeing The Shark Is Broken, a Broadway play about the making of Jaws co-written by the son of Robert Shaw, who played sea captain Quint and allegedly feuded with Dreyfuss on set.

Speaking with EW in 2011, Spielberg described the pair as having "a real mano-a-mano relationship throughout the entire production," adding, "We started adding scenes based on how Robert and Richard were behind the scenes! We started putting some of those anecdotes into the actual film. Matt Hooper’s squeezing of the Styrofoam cup in answer to Shaw’s squeezing of the beer can was something that actually happened."

After seeing the play, which portrays an adversarial relationship between the actors, Dreyfuss told Vanity Fair that he was hurt by how the production made his character "a big jerk" and a "fool."

Speaking to his and Shaw's mutual ribbing, he said, "We didn't take any of that seriously... That was not a feud… We never had any bad feeling between us, ever... There was an ongoing kind of humor between us. If you only saw us on the set, then you might think that there was something — a feud that was going on — but it was never real."

03 of 11

Robert Shaw as Quint

Robert Shaw as Quint in 'Jaws'; Shaw on the set of 'The Deep' in 1976.

Universal/Courtesy Everett; Santi Visalli/Getty

Dreyfuss was at the start of his career in Jaws, and Robert Shaw was near the end of his. Shaw began his career in the '40s, performing Shakespeare with the famous Old Vic theater company in London. He eventually found his way to Hollywood, and in 1967 was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for his turn as Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons (1966).

Aside from Jaws, Shaw is likely best known for his performance as assassin Donald Grant in From Russia with Love (1963) and mobster Doyle Lonnegan in The Sting (1973), though he also leaves an impression in films including Battle of the Bulge (1965) and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974).

Shaw was also renowned as a writer of multiple novels, plays, and screenplays. He also had a hand in refining Quint's famous Indianapolis monologue. As Spielberg explained to Ain't It Cool in 2011, Shaw helped shape and trim it down after a few drafts of the speech were penned by writer Howard Sackler and filmmaker John Milius.

"Robert was great with me," Spielberg told EW in 2011. "He really was, yeah. We had a very good working relationship. Robert was a colorful character. A brilliant actor, but a very colorful personality."

When asked to elaborate on "colorful," Spielberg elaborated, "'Colorful' just means that he was very challenging. If you challenged him, he would challenge you."

In 1978, Shaw died of a heart attack at the age of 51.

The actor's "colorful" nature, fueled in part by his well-documented alcoholism, is front and center in The Shark Is Broken, the play about the making of Jaws (and the Indianapolis monologue, in particular) co-written by and starring his son, Ian Shaw.

04 of 11

Lorraine Gary as Ellen Brody

Lorraine Gary as Ellen Brody in 'Jaws'; Gary at a 'Jaws' screening at the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival.

Universal/Courtesy Everett; Jesse Grant/Getty

Lorraine Gary played Ellen Brody, wife of Scheider's Chief Brody, in Jaws, Jaws 2, and Jaws: The Revenge (1987), which finds her mourning her late husband while squaring off against a great white that followed her to the Bahamas in search of revenge. (Yeah, it's weird.)

Gary worked extensively throughout the late '60s and '70s, appearing on series such as Ironside (1968–1973), McMillan & Wife (1971–1972), and Kojak (1973–1974) before making her film debut in Jaws. She would go on to appear in films including Car Wash (1976), Just You and Me, Kid (1979), and Spielberg's 1941 (1979), which she declared to be her final role before retiring. (She would briefly come out of retirement for Jaws: The Revenge.)

When she was 19, Gary married Sidney Sheinberg, the Universal Pictures head who Spielberg credited with "[giving] birth to my career" after the mogul's 2019 death. The pair raised two sons, Bill Sheinberg and Jonathan Sheinberg.

"It was Sid that decided to spend the extra money to bet on Steven's talent," Gary told PEOPLE in June 2025. "He knew this was going to be a very big movie, and it was Sid's idea to open huge in 400 theaters, which was generally not done. And he's the man you can blame for the summer blockbusters! I blame him for that, too. I don't like most of those other movies, but I did like Jaws."

05 of 11

Murray Hamilton as Mayor Larry Vaughn

Murray Hamilton as Mayor Larry Vaughn in 'Jaws'; Hamilton on ABC's 'Hail to the Chief' in 1985.

Universal/Courtesy Everett; American Broadcasting Companies via Getty

Sure, the shark is scary, but Jaws' true villain is Larry Vaughn, the Amity Island mayor who prioritizes profits over safety. Played with oily charisma by Murray Hamilton, the character is still booed to this day.

Hamilton's screen career began 30 years prior to Jaws' release, with the actor appearing in enduring classics like The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), The Hustler (1961), and The Graduate (1967), in which he played the cuckolded Mr. Robinson.

"I had been a big fan of his from The FBI Story with James Stewart to The Graduate," Spielberg said in the 2023 book Spielberg: The First 10 Years (via Vanity Fair). "I wanted to work with him, and I saw him instantly as the mayor of Amity. I didn’t have to go through many other actors. He was the first choice for the part, and I was lucky to get him."

Hamilton would later reunite with Spielberg for 1941, and also reprise his Jaws role for the sequel. In addition to a supporting role in megahit The Amityville Horror (1979), Hamilton's post-Jaws career was filled with guest appearances on popular series including B. J. and the Bear (1981), Murder, She Wrote (1984), and The Golden Girls (1986), the latter of which found him playing the father of Rue McClanahan's Blanche.

The actor was meant to reprise Mayor Vaughn once more for Jaws: The Revenge, but died of lung cancer at the age of 63, prior to production. He left behind a wife, Terri DeMarco Hamilton of the DeMarco Sisters, and a son, David.

06 of 11

Lee Fierro as Mrs. Kintner

Lee Fierro as Mrs. Kintner in 'Jaws'; Fierro in Martha's Vineyard in 2005.

Universal Pictures; Tara Bricking/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty

Lee Fierro was a mother and Martha's Vineyard local who stepped into the key role of Mrs. Kintner, the grieving mother of Alex, a boy killed by the shark.

Fierro only appeared in three films — Jaws, Jaws: The Revenge, and The Mistover Tale (2016) — but she served as artistic director of the Island Theatre Workshop for over 25 years, and acted in several productions at the Martha's Vineyard Playhouse.

"The choice of Lee Fierro was one of the better ones," said Jaws casting director Shari Rhodes in the BBC’s 1997 documentary, In The Teeth of Jaws. "There's something about living on that island and understanding what having a child in that water can mean. You have this absolute horror of that child not coming back."

Fierro's famous slap of Scheider's Chief Brody was so intense that Scheider himself . "The actress had no idea how to hit someone in the movies. Every time she slapped me, she really slapped me, and it hurt like hell. She had no control," he wrote. "A couple of times I wanted to strangle her, but it was very effective.” The shot apparently took 17 takes.

Fierro died in 2020 from complications related to COVID-19.

07 of 11

Carl Gottlieb as Meadows

Carl Gottlieb as Meadows in 'Jaws'; Gottlieb at Paramount Studios in 2018.

Universal Pictures; Rodin Eckenroth/Getty

Carl Gottlieb played Meadows, an Amity Island reporter, in Jaws, but he was a bigger presence behind the scenes, working with Spielberg as a co-writer.

Speaking in the documentary In the Teeth of Jaws, Gottlieb describes the film's first draft, penned by Sackler, as "a fairly conventional thriller... without much humor to it," adding that "the characters were kind of one-dimensional."

Spielberg adds, "I asked Carl Gottlieb, who was a friend of mine, to come in to do a polish and help me... if I wanted to improvise scenes, Carl would be there to help organize the improvisation and help put it on paper."

Gottlieb would go on to contribute to the scripts for Jaws 2 and Jaws 3-D (1983), and would even write a book, 1975's The Jaws Log, about the film's production. He also worked on scripts for films including The Jerk (1979) and Doctor Detroit (1983), and directed the Ringo Starr-starring Caveman (1981).

Gottlieb also continued to act, appearing in films like The Sting II (1983), Johnny Dangerously (1984), and Clueless (1995). As recently as 2017, he played himself on an episode of Tim Heidecker's gonzo spy spoof Decker.

08 of 11

Susan Backlinie as Chrissie Watkins

Susan Backlinie as Chrissie in 'Jaws'; Backlinie at Chiller Theatre Expo Halloween 2023.

Universal/Courtesy Everett; Bobby Bank/Getty

In one of the most famous scenes ever put to film, actress and stuntwoman Susan Backlinie plays Chrissie, Jaws' first victim.

"I didn’t want an actor to do it. I wanted a stuntperson because I needed somebody who was great in the water, who knew water ballet, and knew how to endure what I imagined was going to be a whole lot of violent shaking," Spielberg said in Spielberg: The First 10 Years. "So, I went to stunts to find her, and Susan was up to the challenge."

She continued to work as a stuntwoman and animal trainer on projects such as The Return of the Incredible Hulk (1977) and The Villain (1979), and also acted in Spielberg's 1941, The Great Muppet Caper (1981), and The Fall Guy (1982).

Backlinie died in May 2024 at the age of 77 from a heart attack.

09 of 11

Jeffrey Kramer as Deputy Hendricks

Jeffrey Kramer as Deputy Leonard Hendricks in 'Jaws'; Kramer at Chiller Theatre Expo Spring 2023.

Universal Pictures; Bobby Bank/Getty

In his first role in a studio production, Jeffrey Kramer played Deputy Hendricks, Brody's right-hand man on Amity Island and the first on the scene following the death of Backlinie's Chrissie.

"Hendricks is the audience’s eyes and ears," the 79-year-old Kramer said in an interview with Gold Derby for the film's 50th anniversary. "He reacts with the same revulsion viewers had in the theater. And none of us have swam in the ocean the same way since!"

Kramer went on to have a fruitful career in Hollywood, performing in beloved films and series such as Halloween II (1981), Clue (1985), and Santa Claus: The Movie (1985).

He found greater success, however, as an Emmy-winning producer on series such as The Practice and Ally McBeal.

10 of 11

Jeffrey Voorhees as Alex Kintner

Jeffrey Voorhees as Alex Kintner in 'Jaws'; Voorhees in 'The Shark Is Still Working'.

Universal Pictures (2)

For all of Jaws' carnage, nothing churns the gut quite like the death of local boy Alex Kintner, played by Jeffrey Voorhees.

"At one point, I remember I was standing at the door, and after the death of the Kintner boy, a man got up and started walking out — I thought, 'Oh my God. Our first walkout," Spielberg said in Spielberg: The First 10 Years. "Then he began running and I went, 'Oh, no, he’s not walking out — he’s running out.' I could tell he was headed for the bathrooms, but he didn’t make it and vomited all over the floor. And I just went, 'Oh my God, what have I done? What kind of a movie have I made? A man has just barfed because of my film.' But the great news was, about five minutes later, he went right back to his seat."

As Voorhees explained in a 2024 interview with SyFy.com, the Martha's Vineyard local "hid" from the notoriety of his Jaws role for years, but grew to embrace it after attending some fan conventions (and receiving residual checks). "It pays to die," he told the outlet.

These days, Voorhees continues to attend fan conventions and events, and enjoys his status as a local celebrity on Martha's Vineyard, where he's currently retired. You may even meet him during one of the island's tours of Jaws' shooting locations, as he occasionally pops by to chat with fans.

11 of 11

Peter Benchley as Interviewer

Peter Benchley in 'Jaws'; Benchley in 2005.

Universal/Courtesy Everett; Chris Polk/FilmMagic

Peter Benchley, who penned the 1974 book on which Jaws is based, has a cameo in the film as a local interviewer.

It was Benchley's debut fiction novel — he'd previously penned a few non-fiction releases — and the author found continued success writing maritime thrillers, including The Island (1979) and Beast (1991), many of which were adapted into feature films and TV movies.

He even acted in a few more films, including a 1977 adaptation of his novel The Deep and Alan Rudolph's Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), a film in which Campbell Scott plays Benchley's grandfather, a one-time member of the famed Algonquin Round Table.

Following Jaws' success, Benchley expressed regret over the story's impact on the public's fear of sharks and the decimation of shark populations, committing himself to shark conservation and education efforts.

"[The] knowledge we have accumulated about great whites in the past 25 years has convinced me that I couldn't possibly write Jaws today... not in good conscience anyway," the author wrote in the Independent in 2000. "Back then, it was generally accepted that great whites were anthropophagous (i.e. they ate people) by choice. Now we know that almost every attack on a human is an accident: the shark mistakes the human for its normal prey."

In 2006, Benchley died at the age of 65 of pulmonary fibrosis. Nine years later, researchers named a new species of lanternshark after the author, calling it Etmopterus benchleyi, specifically citing his shark advocacy. The author's estate carries on that advocacy with the Benchley Awards, which work to recognize achievements in ocean conservation.

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Where can I watch Jaws?

Roy Scheider in 'Jaws'.

FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty

You can currently watch Jaws, Jaws 2, Jaws 3-D, and Jaws: The Revenge on Peacock.