Original at
The Independent
Anthony Quinn
05 June 2001
Anthony Rudolph Oaxaca Quinn, actor: born Chihuahua, Mexico 21 April 1915;
married 1937 Katherine De Mille (died 1995; one son, three daughters, and
one son deceased; marriage dissolved 1965), 1966 Jolanda Addolori (three
sons; marriage dissolved 1997), 1997 Kathy Benvin (one son, one daughter);
died Boston, Massachusetts 3 June 2001.
When the Citadel Press published The Films of Anthony Quinn (by Alvin H.
Marill, 1975), I asked one London bookseller how many she had ordered. "Three,"
she replied. "I usually take two or three dozen in this series and I'm only
stocking these for those who want a complete set." Anthony Quinn was a star
by sheer will, but with a little help from his friends.
For the first two decades of his career he was anything but a star. He began
as an unexceptional member of Paramount's B stock-company, but was elevated
to appear in two movies directed by Cecil B. De Mille, The Plainsman (1936),
his second film, as an Indian, and The Buccaneer (1938), as a French pirate.
After he married De Mille's adopted daughter, Katherine, the director gave
him a more substantial role in Union Pacific (1939), again villainous, as
a dandy and cardsharp, but Paramount thought that his talent extended to
no more than a heavy in B-movies. (Robert Preston was another whom the studio
thought had no future except in its B-movies.)
Brought up in Los Angeles, Quinn was born in Mexico, of mixed Irish-US-Mexican
descent, with looks that seemed suitable for sinister foreigners but even
then he was never in the big league. Being a crony of John Barrymore (who
had noticed him in a play, Clean Beds, in which he played a drunken actor
based on Barrymore), and a member of the De Mille family, he consorted with
the famous, which to his chagrin did not further his career. After a good
role as a Cuban assassin in an A picture, The Ghost Busters (1940), Quinn
broke his contract and began to freelance, hoping for better opportunities.
His model was Humphrey Bogart, who was then being promoted to stardom: but
there was a great difference, for Bogart was already a much-admired actor.
Quinn was only offered the sort of roles he had been playing, if in bigger
pictures, but both they and he had more bite: in Road to Morocco (1943),
as an Arab chieftain; in The Ox-Bow Incident, as one of the Mexicans who
is lynched; in Buffalo Bill (1944), as an Indian warrior. In sympathetic
roles Quinn seemed only vacuous, but he excelled with a sneer, a bad man
who could be suave and stupid at the same time. In 1949 he persuaded a minor
company, Allied Artists, to star him and his wife in White Gold, in which
they played ill-treated Indians, but it passed unnoticed; he starred in
a Broadway play that flopped, but that brought him Marlon Brando's role
in the touring company of A Streetcar Named Desire.
Elia Kazan liked him sufficiently in that to ask him to play Brando's elder
brother in Viva Zapata! (1952), against the wishes of the head of the studio,
Darryl F. Zanuck, who disliked Brando's mumbling and Zanuck himself favoured
either Tyrone Power or Quinn for the lead. In his memoirs Kazan writes bemusedly
of Quinn's competitive behaviour, but Quinn felt himself justified when
his performance brought him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. At last
what he wanted was within his grasp.
Europe brought him to stardom. The Italian team of Carlo Ponti and Dino
De Laurentiis, aiming at the international market offered him a three-picture
deal, starting with Ulysses (1954), opposite Kirk Douglas and continuing
with Attila the Hun (also 1954), with himself in the title-role. The one
that made the difference was Fellini's art-house hit La Strada (1955), in
which Quinn was the itinerant entertainer who is so cruel to dear little
downtrodden Giulietta Masina (Fellini's wife). Nothing Quinn had done up
to this point had allowed him to show his range brutish as usual, but
for the first time commanding a certain sympathy.
He was given star billing in Hollywood in three undistinguished films, but
returned to below-the-title in Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life (1956):
the prospect of Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh and Quinn as Gauguin was fairly
daunting, and the result was that they were less like artists than caged
animals. Though decried today, the film was then a prestige success; and
a second Best Supporting Oscar did Quinn no harm at all.
Nor did it do him any good. In Europe he played Quasimodo in a French Hunchback
of Notre Dame, opposite Gina Lollobrigida, and then he announced that he
was giving up acting for directing. His father-in-law allowed him to remake
The Buccaneer (1957) with Yul Brynner, but it failed resoundingly. He returned
to acting and over the next few years it was impossible to read the trade
press without reading of Quinn's prolific plans for starring vehicles, mainly
in independent productions. He had been around a long time and knew who
to talk to: but none of these pictures was made.
However, a new era had dawned in Hollywood, and it was one in which Quinn
could flourish. It had taken the post-war world a while to tire of the relentless
unreality of Hollywood, even as American critics were praising more earthy
fare from Europe. Hollywood responded by turning to television, which hadn't
the budget then for glamour and the restorative in drama, amidst a diet
of soap operas, was some slice-of-life plays, the most celebrated of which
was Paddy Chayevsky's Marty. In the 1955 film version the ugly-pug hero
was played by Ernest Borgnine, who won his Best Actor Oscar alongside Anna
Magnani for The Rose Tattoo: and she was no oil-painting either.
As the most praised actress of the Italian neo-realist cinema, Magnani had
been wooed by Hollywood for years. Striking lucky that first time, she agreed
to make a second film for the same producer, Hal Wallis. Having okayed Quinn
as her leading man, they set out to breathe new life into one of the old
perennials that one about the mail-order bride and the rough unfeeling
husband who doesn't realise that he loves her till he finds her in the arms
of another man. It was called Wild is the Wind (1957); George Cukor directed
it and virtually no one went to see it.
But it had made Quinn an over-the-title star. The days of typecasting had
gone, and he could be loutish in Hot Spell (1958) as Shirley Booth's husband,
avuncular in a Marty-clone, The Black Orchid (1959) as Sophia Loren's old
reliable, and flamboyant as an old-time touring actor in Cukor's Heller
in Pink Tights (1960) none of which, by the way, was successful. However,
he was in a popular western, Last Train From Gun Hill, with Kirk Douglas,
and he held his own when he returned to Broadway to co-star with Olivier
in Anouilh's Becket. Quinn was Henry II and at some point in the run Olivier
decided that that was the better of the two parts. Quinn was committed to
a film after a short tour, but deeply resented not being informed that Olivier
intended to take on his role while bringing in Arthur Kennedy to play Becket.
In Europe Quinn was among several stars in two successful spectaculars,
The Guns of Navarone (1961) and David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962),
respectively as Greek resistance leader and an Arab chieftain; he was the
biggest of several lesser names in one of De Laurentiis's equally ambitious
productions, Barabbas, in the title-role, a performance best described as
"careful". When he agreed to do a low-budget film for the little-known Cypriot
director Michael Cacoyannis, 20th Century-Fox agreed to finance it: and
when Zorba the Greek was released in 1964 the studio had a world-wide hit
on its hands.
Whatever the merits of Kazantzakis's original novel the film is little more
than an over-heated tale of a prissy young Anglo-Greek (Alan Bates) who,
inheriting some land in Crete, goes there to meet what Synopsis called "a
life force" i.e. Zorba, who is Quinn, irreverent, coarse, instinctive,
cheerful, boastful, cunning, fatalistic. To America's two most influential
critics the performance was a revelation; in The New Yorker Pauline Kael
called it "wonderfully satisfying" but Bosley Crowther went even further
in The New York Times:
We are not used to so much exuberance, so much persuasiveness . . . [Quinn
possesses] all the energies of the great ones of history and myth. He is
Adam in the Garden of Eden, Odysseus on the windy plains of Troy.
Anyone impressed by this presumably also believed in "the meanness and ignorance
of the people of Crete" and that it was an island with a "hard, barren look".
Crete? Those who dissented from the torrent of praise included those self-same
people, a consolation to non-Cretans who found the film like a bad Victorian
academic painting: carefully done, but sentimental, predictable and specious.
Quinn's performance was technically correct and a sure centre: the Oscar
which seemed such a shoo-in, from the reviews, went to Rex Harrison for
My Fair Lady.
The director's next film, The Day the Fish Came Out, was a fiasco, but Quinn
had found the role he would essentially play for the rest of his life, a
rough diamond who was not so much son-of-the-soil as Earth Father, gusty,
lusty, unshaven, all-embracing. Only five years later John Coleman wrote
in the New Statesman, "Mr Quinn goes on doing his personal impression of
the life force. Once more and some of us won't be around tomorrow." Dilys
Powell echoed this the following year:
There is a persistent tendency, when someone is wanted to play an Eskimo,
or a gypsy, or a drunken Indian, or a Mexican, or just another throaty character,
to send for Anthony Quinn. OK, but I wish they would not ask me along to
watch.
The range and versatility which Quinn had shown for a while were seldom
apparent thereafter, and down with him went several versions of modern classics,
from A High Wind in Jamaica (1965) and The Magus (1968) to The Old Man and
the Sea (1990), made for American television. As early as 1968 the show-business
paper Variety looked at Quinn's box-office record and decided that he was
not worth the money he was being paid. Other supporting actors who achieved
eminence but who were not star material returned to their more humble roles,
like Borgnine and Jack Palance while Lee Marvin, for instance, proved
himself to be of the stuff that stars were made.
It was not so much that Quinn was a bad actor as the fact that he had no
variety, no depth. Within five minutes he gave you everything in his box
of tricks and there was nothing more to reach for. So perhaps did Cagney,
but he had style, magnetism, charm and above all a truth, all of which Quinn
lacked. These were/are qualities not greatly in abundance in Charles Bronson,
the only other player to challenge Quinn's record of stardom after a long
stint in supporting roles: but Bronson restrained his appearances to sure-fire
(at least, as far as the box office was concerned) action adventures and
thrillers while Quinn still had aspirations to class. Powell and Coleman
were in the vanguard of critics no longer interested in him; with that support
gone and with no popular following Quinn looked beyond Hollywood and, it
was rumoured and widely believed, he would have had to do so much earlier
had he not had Mafia protection.
Even the bad guys couldn't persuade the Hollywood studios to invest in movies
which would not make back their advertising costs. Quinn filmed in Italy,
France, Spain, South Africa, Mexico and, most notably, some Arab countries.
I say "most notably" because how many buffs, even, could name any of Quinn's
films in the last 30 years except Caravans (1978), financed by the Persian
government when that country was trying to enter international film production,
and The Message (1976), a.k.a. Mohammad, Messenger of God, and Omar Mukhtair,
Lion of the Desert (1981), both propaganda spectacles made by a consortium
of Arab countries. The latter was one of the most expensive movies made
till then, costing $30m, but it took only $1.5m in the US despite hefty
promotion.
During this period (1983-86) Quinn did have a personal success with a musicalised
Zorba on Broadway and on tour, in fact a revival of a show which had not
done very well the first time around. He returned to Hollywood to play a
supporting role for Kevin Costner in Revenge (1990), which Costner also
directed, as the friend whose wife Costner takes away from him. It was good
to have him retrieved from the deceptive heights of stardom, to which he
was temperamentally never really suited.
David Shipman
*
Anthony Quinn was an actor whose forceful personality inevitably attracted
a passionate response, writes Tom Vallance, and there were times when one
groaned at the prospect of yet another portrayal of life-affirming virility.
But it must be acknowledged that it is hard to imagine another actor being
such an indelible Zorba, the rugged romantic dancing to bouzouki music with
a bottle of ouzo in his hand. There were other fine performances his memorable
depiction of the libertine painter Gauguin in Lust for Life, one of the
shortest performances (less than 10 minutes' screen time) to win an Oscar,
his brutish travelling player in La Strada and his vigorously amoral Bedouin
chieftain in Lawrence of Arabia.
One of his greatest performances was given in the screen version of Rod
Serling's television play Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962), in which he
totally sublimated his personality in the character of a proud but battered
prizefighter. It was a favourite of the actor himself, who was aware of
his limitations "I think I am lucky," he once said. "I was born with very
little talent but great drive."
In 1983 when I went to see him in the Broadway revival of the musical Zorba
(a show which had originally failed with another actor) it was with some
trepidation, since Quinn had already been touring in the show and would
possibly be going through the motions by rote at this stage, but his performance
was full of energy, brio and enthusiasm as if it were the first night
the mark of a true professional. He had his original co-star Lila Kedrova
as the ageing coquette Hortense, and the charisma the pair exuded was palpable.
"I am Zorba!" the actor once said, and his zest for life certainly paralleled
that of his screen creation. He had 13 children by five women, three of
whom he married. (Tragically, his first child Christopher died at the age
of three when he wandered into the neighbouring garden of W.C. Fields and
drowned in the swimming pool.) He married Jolanda Addolori, his second wife,
who had been a costumer on Barabbas, when she was pregnant with their third
child, but they separated when Quinn's former secretary Kathy Benvin announced
that she was having his child. He ultimately married Benvin in 1997.
In his autobiography One Man Tango (1995) Quinn revealed that he had affairs
with Carole Lombard, Rita Hayworth and Ingrid Bergman. He also found time
to pursue a lifelong interest in sculpture and painting, his works being
exhibited all over the world and drawing high prices on the international
art market, and most days he would jog and swim.
Although he underwent a coronary bypass in 1990, he continued to act in
both America and Europe during the last decade. He co-starred with the veteran
actress Maureen O'Hara in the romantic Only the Lonely (1991), played a
foul-tempered, bigoted father in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever (1991), had a
cameo in the Schwarzenegger vehicle The Last Action Hero (1993), and once
again portrayed a firm believer in the life-affirming power of love in A
Walk in the Clouds (1995) as the exuberant Mexican patriarch of a family
vineyard in California. He was a mobster in the television movie Gotti (1996)
and plays a mafia chieftain in his final film, Avenging Angels, which stars
Sylvester Stallone and is still in production.
"To me," Quinn once said, "acting is living. I love to live, so I live.
I love to act, so I act. I gotta have vitality."
* David Shipman died 22 April 1996
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