Anthony Quinn

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other people named Anthony Quinn see Anthony Quinn (disambiguation)

Anthony Quinn
Anthony Quinn
Born	Antonio Rodolfo Oaxaca Quinn April 21, 1915(1915-04-21) Chihuahua, Chihuahua, Mexico
Died	June 3, 2001 (aged 86) Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Years active	1936 - 2001
Spouse(s)	Katherine DeMille (1937-1965) Jolanda Addolori (1966-1997) Kathy Benvin (1997-2001)
Awards won Academy Awards Best Supporting Actor 1952 Viva Zapata! 1956 Lust for Life Golden Globe Awards Cecil B. DeMille Award 1987 Lifetime Achievement

Anthony Quinn (April 21, 1915 – June 3, 2001) was a two-time Academy Award-winning Mexican/American actor, as well as a painter and writer. He appeared as the lead in a number of films both critically acclaimed and commercially successful, the most notable being the title character in Michael Cacoyannis' Zorba the Greek and the cruel circus performer in Federico Fellini's La strada. Quinn also appeared in such films as Lawrence of Arabia, Viva Zapata!, Lust for Life, Barabbas, Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Shoes of the Fisherman, and The Guns of Navarone.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Career 1.3 Painting and writing 2 Personal life 2.1 Tribute 3 References 4 External links

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Quinn was born Antonio Rodolfo Oaxaca Quinn in Chihuahua, Mexico in the middle of the Mexican Revolution. His mother, Manuela "Nellie" (née Oaxaca), was a Mexican of Aztec ancestry.^[1][2] His father, Frank "Francisco" Quinn, was born in Mexico to a Mexican mother and an Irish father. Frank fought alongside Pancho Villa, years later he moved to Los Angeles and became an assistant cameraman at a movie studio called Zelig's. In Quinn's autobiography The Original Sin: A Self-Portrait by Anthony Quinn he denied being the son of an "Irish adventurer" and attributed that tale to Hollywood publicists.^[3] When he was six years old, he started attending a Catholic church (for a time thinking that he wanted to become a priest), then later, when he was eleven, joined the Pentecostals in the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (the Pentecostal followers of Aimee Semple McPherson).^[4] Quinn grew up first in the streets of El Paso, Texas, then later the Boyle Heights and the Echo Park neighborhoods of Los Angeles, California, attending Hammel St. Elementary School, Belvedere Junior High School, and the Polytechnic High School and later Belmont High School. He did not graduate. In the 1990s, Tucson High School in Tucson, Arizona awarded him a high school diploma.

In his youth, Quinn boxed, then studied art and architecture under Frank Lloyd Wright at the latter's Arizona residence and Wisconsin studio, Taliesin, and the two men became friends. When Quinn revealed that he was drawn to acting, Wright encouraged this major change in career direction. In an interview Quinn said that he told Wright that he had been offered $800 a week by a studio and didn't know what to do. Wright told him "Take it, you'll never make that much with me."^{[cite this quote]}

[edit] Career

After a brief stint in the theater, Quinn launched his film career playing character roles in several 1936 films, including Parole (his debut) and The Milky Way. He mainly played "ethnic" villains in Paramount films through the 1940s in films such as Dangerous to Know (1938) and Road to Morocco. By 1947, he was a veteran of over 50 films and had played everything from Indians, Mafia dons, Hawaiian chiefs, Filipino freedom-fighters, Chinese guerrillas, and comical Arab sheiks, but he was not a major star. So he made a successful return to the theater, including playing Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway.

In 1947, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.^[2] Returning to the screen in the early 1950s, Quinn specialized in tough, macho roles. He was cast in a series of B-adventures like Mask of the Avenger (1951). A big break was his playing opposite Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata! (1952). His supporting role as Zapata's brother won Quinn his first Oscar, the first Mexican-American to win any Academy Award.^{[citation needed]} He appeared in several Italian films starting in 1953, turning in one of his best performances as a dim-witted, thuggish, and volatile strongman in Federico Fellini's La strada (1954), playing alongside Giulietta Masina. Quinn won his second Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for portraying the painter Gauguin in Vincente Minnelli's Van Gogh biopic, Lust for Life (1956). This award was all the more remarkable given that he was onscreen for all of 8 minutes. The following year, he received yet another Oscar nomination for his part in George Cukor's Wild Is the Wind. In The River's Edge (1957), he played the husband of the former girlfriend (played by Debra Paget) of a killer, played by Ray Milland, who turns up with a stolen fortune and forces Quinn and Paget at gunpoint to guide him safely to Mexico. Quinn starred in The Savage Innocents 1959 (film), in which he starred as Inuk, who finds himself caught between two clashing cultures.

As the decade came to a close, Quinn allowed his age to show, and he began his transformation into a major character actor. 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 Guns of Navarone (1961), an ideal ex-boxer in Requiem for a Heavyweight, and a natural for the role of Auda ibu Tayi in Lawrence of Arabia (both 1962). In that year, he also played the title role in Barabbas, based on the novel by Pär Lagerkvist. The film is an Easter season favorite down to the present day. The success of Zorba the Greek in 1964 was arguably the high water mark of Quinn's career, and resulted in another Oscar nomination. Later successes that decade include La Vingt-cinquième heure (1967; aka The Twenty Fifth Hour), with Virna Lisi; The Magus (1968), with Michael Caine and Candice Bergen, and based on the novel by John Fowles; and The Shoes of the Fisherman, where he played a Russian pope. In 1969 he starred in The Secret of Santa Vittoria with Anna Magnani, and in 1970 he starred in Flap with Victor French and Tony Bill.

He appeared on Broadway to great acclaim in Becket, as King Henry II to Laurence Olivier's Thomas Becket in 1960. An erroneous story arose in later years that during the run, Quinn and Olivier switched roles and Quinn played Becket to Olivier's King. In fact, Quinn left the production for a film, never having played Becket, and director Peter Glenville suggested a road tour with Olivier as Henry. Olivier happily acceded and Arthur Kennedy took on the role of Becket for the tour and brief return to Broadway.^[5][6]

In 1971, after the success of a TV movie named The City, where Quinn played Albuquerque Mayor Thomas Jefferson Alcala, he starred in the short-lived (1-season) television drama spin-off The Man in the City. His subsequent television appearances were sporadic (among them Jesus of Nazareth).

In 1977, He starred in the movie Mohammad, Messenger of God (aka The Message), about the origin of Islam, as Hamzah, a highly revered warrior instrumental in the early stages of Islam. In 1982, he starred in the Lion of the Desert, together with Irene Papas, Oliver Reed, Rod Steiger, and John Gielgud. Quinn played the real-life Bedouin leader Omar Mukhtar who fought Mussolini's Italian troops in the deserts of Libya. The film, produced and directed by Moustapha Akkad, is now critically acclaimed, but performed poorly at the box office because of negative publicity in the West at the time of its release, stemming from its having been partially funded by Libya's Muammar al-Gaddafi. In 1983, he reprised his most famous role, playing Zorba the Greek for 362 performances in a successful revival of the Kander and Ebb musical Zorba.

His film career slowed during the 1990s, but Quinn nonetheless continued to work steadily, appearing in Jungle Fever (1991), Last Action Hero (1993), and A Walk in the Clouds (1995). In 1994, he played Zeus in the five TV movies that led to the syndicated series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. (However, he did not continue in the actual series, and the role was eventually filled by several other actors).

[edit] Painting and writing

This section needs to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please help improve this article with relevant internal links. (October 2007)

Art critic Donald Kuspit, explains, "examining Quinn’s many expressions of creativity together—his art and acting—we can see that he was a creative genius, by which I mean that the works that he made and surrounded himself with are of an imaginative piece, not simply passing fancies..."^[7]

Early in life Quinn had interest in painting and drawing. Throughout his teenage years he won various art competitions in California and focused his studies at Polytechnic High School in Los Angeles on drafting. Later, Quinn studied briefly under Frank Lloyd Wright through the Taliesin Fellowship—an opportunity created by winning first prize in an architectural design contest. Through Wright’s recommendation, Quinn took acting lessons as a form of post-operative speech therapy, which led to an acting career that spanned over six decades.

Apart from art classes taken in Chicago during the 1950s, Quinn never attended art school; nonetheless, taking advantage of books, museums, and amassing a sizable collection, he managed to give himself an effective education in the language of modern art. Although Quinn remained mostly self-taught, intuitively seeking out and exploring new ideas, there is observable history in his work because he had assiduously studied the modernist masterpieces on view in the galleries of New York, Mexico City, Paris, and London. When filming on location around the world, Quinn was exposed to regional contemporary art styles exhibited at local galleries and studied art history in each area.

In an endless search for inspiration, he was influenced by his Mexican ancestry, decades of residency in Europe, and lengthy stays in Africa and the Middle East while filming in the 1970s and 1980s.

By the early 1980s, his work had caught the eyes of various gallery owners and was exhibited internationally, in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and Mexico City. His work is now represented in both public and private collections throughout the world.

He wrote two memoirs, The Original Sin (1972) and One Man Tango (1997), a number of scripts, and a series of unpublished stories currently in the collection of his archive.

[edit] Personal life

Quinn's personal life was as volatile and passionate as the characters he played in films. His first wife was the adopted daughter of Cecil B. DeMille, the actress Katherine DeMille, whom he married in 1937. The couple had five children: Christopher (born 1939), Christina (born December 1, 1941), Catalina (born November 21, 1942), Duncan (born August 4, 1945), and Valentina (born December 26, 1952).^[8] One of their sons, Christopher, age 3, drowned in the swimming pool of next-door neighbor W.C. Fields. Quinn and DeMille were divorced in 1965.

The next year, he married costume designer Iolanda Quinn (Jolanda Addolori). They had three children: Francesco (born March 22, 1962), Danny (born April 16, 1964), and Lorenzo (born May 7, 1966). The union ended in 1997, after Quinn fathered a child with his secretary, Kathy Benvin. He then married Benvin, with whom he had two children, Antonia (born July 23, 1994) and Ryan (born July 5, 1996).^[9] Quinn and Benvin remained together until his death.

Quinn had three known mistresses and fathered a total of 13 children, among them Alex A. Quinn, Francesco Quinn, Lorenzo Quinn, Valentina, and Sean Quinn, a New Jersey real estate agent.^[9][10]

Quinn spent his last years in Bristol, Rhode Island. He died aged 86 in Boston, Massachusetts from pneumonia and respiratory failure while suffering from cancer shortly after completing his role in his last film, Avenging Angelo (2002).

His funeral was held in a Baptist church; late in life, he had joined the Four Square evangelical Christian community. He is buried in a family plot near Bristol.

[edit] Tribute

On January 5, 1982, the Belvedere County Public Library in East Los Angeles was renamed in honor of Anthony Quinn. The present library sits on the site of his family's former home.^[11]

There is a Anthony Quinn Bay and Beach in Rhodes, Dodecanese, Greece, just 2.7 miles (4.3 km) south of the village of Faliraki (aka Falirakion or Falirákion).^[12][13] The Flashback Diner in Miami, Florida also pays tribute to Quinn by naming their gyro the "Anthony Quinn".

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• The Estate of Anthony Quinn
• Anthony Quinn's artwork
• Unquelled Persona: encountering the artwork of Anthony Quinn 2008 ArtsEditor.com article
• Anthony Quinn at the Internet Movie Database
• Anthony Quinn Memorial Page at FindaGrave
• Directing Anthony Quinn and article by Josh Becker
• The Making of Lawrence of Arabia, Digitised BAFTA Journal, Winter 1962-3

Awards
Preceded by Karl Malden for A Streetcar Named Desire	Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor 1952 for Viva Zapata!	Succeeded by Frank Sinatra for From Here to Eternity
Preceded by Jack Lemmon for Mister Roberts	Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor 1956 for Lust for Life	Succeeded by Red Buttons for Sayonara

v • d • e Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor Donald Crisp (1941) · Van Heflin (1942) · Charles Coburn (1943) · Barry Fitzgerald (1944) · James Dunn (1945) · Harold Russell (1946) · Edmund Gwenn (1947) · Walter Huston (1948) · Dean Jagger (1949) George Sanders (1950) · Karl Malden (1951) · Anthony Quinn (1952) · Frank Sinatra (1953) · Edmond O'Brien (1954) · Jack Lemmon (1955) · Anthony Quinn (1956) · Red Buttons (1957) · Burl Ives (1958) · Hugh Griffith (1959) · Peter Ustinov (1960) Complete list · (1936–1940) · (1941–1960) · (1961–1980) · (1981–2000) · (2001-present)