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Anthony Quinn (April 21, 1915 – June 3, 2001) was a
Mexican-American actor, painter, and writer. He is best known for his performances in the
popular Hollywood movies Zorba the Greek and Viva Zapata.
He was born Antonio Rudolfo Oaxaca Quinn in Chihuahua,
Chihuahua, Mexico to an Irish father and a Mexican mother, a combination that would
later allow him to play many different ethnicities. He grew up in the Boyle Heights
neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Quinn left
school early (much later, he received his first high school diploma from Tucson High
School in Tucson,
Arizona in the 1990s), and was a prizefighter and a painter before becoming
an actor. Quinn launched his film career playing character roles in several 1936 films,
including Parole (his debut) and
The Milky Way ,
after a brief stint in the theater. Quinn remained relegated to playing "ethnic"
villains in Paramount films through the 1940s. By 1947, he was a veteran of over
50 films and had played everything from Indians, Mafia dons, Hawaiian chiefs,
Chinese guerrillas, and comical Arab sheiks, but he was still not a major star.
So he returned to the theater, where for three years he found success on
Broadway in such roles as Stanley Kowalski in A
Streetcar Named Desire .
Upon his return to the screen in the early 1950s, Quinn was cast in a series
of B-adventures like Mask of the
Avenger (1951). He got one of his big breaks playing opposite Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata! (1952).
His supporting role as Zapata's brother won Quinn his first Oscar and after that, Quinn
was given larger roles in a variety of features. He went to Italy in 1953 and
appeared in several films, turning in one of his best performances as a
dim-witted, thuggish, and volatile strongman in Federico Fellini's La
Strada , having as his main partner the Italian actress Giulietta Anna
Masina (1954). Quinn won his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar portraying
the painter Gauguin in Vincente Minnelli's
Lust for Life (1956). The
following year, he received another Oscar nomination for George Cukor's Wild is the Wind .
During the 1950s, Quinn specialized in tough, macho roles, but as the decade
ended, he allowed his age to show. His formerly trim physique filled out, his
hair grayed, and his once smooth, swarthy face weathered into an appealing
series of crags and crinkles. His careworn demeanor made him a convincing Greek
resistance fighter in the war film The Guns of Navarone (1961), an ideal
ex-boxer in Requiem for a Heavyweight and a
natural for the villainous Bedouin he played in Lawrence of Arabia (both
1962). The success of Zorba the Greek in 1964 was the high water
mark of Quinn's career during the '60s – it offered him another Oscar nomination
– He also started in the title role of John Fowles' The Magus . As the decade progressed, the quality
of his film work noticeably diminished.
The 1970s offered little change and Quinn became known as a ham, albeit a
well-respected one. In 1971, he starred in the short-lived television drama
Man in the
City . His subsequent television appearances were sporadic (among them
Jesus of Nazareth ).
In 1980 he starred in The Lion of the
Desert movie, together with Irene Papas, Oliver Reed, Rod Steiger and John Gielgud. It was about the real-life Bedouin leader Omar Mukhtar (Quinn) who fought Mussolini's Italian troops in the deserts of Libya. The movie (which was produced and
directed by late Moustapha Akkad) is now critically acclaimed
after initially receiving negative publicity in the West for being partially
funded by Libya's Muammar
al-Qaddafi, thus its relatively poor performance at the box office.
In 1983 he revisited his most famous characterization when he played in a
successful revival of Kander and Ebb's musical version of
Zorba , which ran at the Broadway Theatre in New York for 362 performances.
In 1994, he became a semi-regular guest (playing Zeus) on the syndicated
Hercules series. Though his
film career slowed considerably during the 1990s, Quinn continued to work
steadily, appearing in films as diverse as Jungle Fever (1991), Last Action Hero
(1993), and A Walk in the Clouds (1995). Shortly
after completing his final film role in Avenging Angelo (2001), Anthony Quinn died
of respiratory failure at the age of 86 in Boston, Massachusetts. Quinn proved as volatile and passionate as his screen persona in his personal
life. He divorced his wife Katherine, with whom he had three children, in 1956.
The following year he embarked on a tempestuous thirty-one-year marriage to
costume designer Iolanda Quinn. The union crumbled in 1993 when Quinn had an
affair with his secretary that resulted in a baby; the two shared a second child
in 1996. In total, Quinn fathered thirteen children, among them Alex A. Quinn, Francesco Quinn ,
Lorenzo Quinn , and
Valentina Quinn ,
and had three known mistresses. |
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