Anthony Quinn, second from left in back row, along with his family, wife Kathy Quinn, left, son Jeb, third from left, son Lorenzo, fourth from left and Lorenzo's wife, Giovanna, youngest son, Ryan and daughter Antonia pose for a portrait during a roast party for Anthony Quinn October 19, 2000 at the Palace Hotel in New York City.
Movie still from the 1957 film adaptation of Victor Hugo's, "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." In this scene, Anthony Quinn, as Quasimodo, is chained atop the belltower.
(Continuing the memoir that began in The Original Sin, Ant...)
Continuing the memoir that began in The Original Sin, Anthony Quinn describes his life from age twenty-five to the present, discussing his Hollywood career, celebrity friendships, and his son's death.
(Four naive Americans, in need of easy cash, decide to fly...)
Four naive Americans, in need of easy cash, decide to fly to Colombia and raid the safe of a notorious drug lord with connections to the corrupt military regime.
Antonio Rodolfo Quinn Oaxaca more commonly known as Anthony Quinn, was a Mexican-American Academy Award-winning actor who was prominent during the 1960s for his work in such landmark films as David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia and Michael Cacoyannis's Zorba the Greek.
Background
Quinn was born Antonio Rodolfo Quinn Oaxaca on April 21, 1915, in Chihuahua, Mexico. Quinn was the eldest of two children born to Francisco (Frank) Quinn and Manuela (Nellie) Oaxaca. The elder Quinn, son of an Irish father and Mexican mother, had fought for Pancho Villa. After becoming a migrant worker, he relocated the family several times before settling in 1920 in East Los Angeles. After Quinn's father died in a car accident in 1926, his mother eventually married Frank Bowles, but Quinn and his sister preferred to reside with their paternal grandmother.
Education
Quinn attended Hammel Street Elementary School, Belvedere Junior High School, Polytechnic High School and Belmont High School in Los Angeles, but left before graduating. Some years later, Tucson High School in Arizona awarded him an honorary high school diploma.
Early in career, Quinn took on a variety of jobs and activities, including boxing. After a short time, he decided to become an actor and joined the Gateway Players, in which he met Hollywood director George Cukor. After a role in Clean Beds attracted good notices, Quinn made a brief but impressive appearance in Parole! (1936). A part in Cecil B. DeMille's The Plainsman (1937) led to a player's contract with Paramount Studios. In 1940 Quinn, refusing to renew his contract, tripled his salary with Warner Brothers Studios, where his first film was City for Conquest (1940), with James Cagney and Elia Kazan. He became a U.S. citizen in 1947, the year of his Broadway debut in The Gentleman from Athens. Major theatrical success developed when Kazan asked him to play Stanley Kowalski on the 1948 national tour of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire.
During the 1960s Quinn appeared in more than a dozen films. He co-starred as Andrea Stavros in the World War II action story The Guns of Navarone (1961), filmed primarily in Greece. He played the Bedouin Auda Abu Tayi in the award-winning epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and appeared as a boxer named Mountain Rivera in Rod Serling's Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962). Releases in 1964 included The Visit, with Ingrid Bergman; Behold a Pale Horse, with Gregory Peck; and Zorba the Greek, with Alan Bates, Irene Papas, and Lila Kedrova.
The latter, through which Quinn became forever identified with the role of Alexis Zorba, was based on a Nikos Kazantzakis novel that had first been transformed unsuccessfully into a 1968 Broadway work. Quinn's volatile and earthy personality and robust intensity, as well as his acute acting sensibilities and his "ethnic" bearing, credibly transformed him into Zorba. His on-screen Zorba represented the universal archetype of a carefree character surviving life's alternating currents of extreme joys and hardships by recharging himself with a simple dance on the sands of life.
Another major role for Quinn in the 1960s was that of Barabbas (1962), in a different type of biblical epic, a genre still popular during that decade.
Quinn continued to work on films—some very popular at the box-office—through the 1990s and left a legacy of more than one hundred film appearances. In addition to his career as an actor, Anthony Quinn 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.
Achievements
Anthony Quinn was a film actor whose name assured moviegoers and television viewers of a memorable performance—usually by a forceful, masculine presence whose frequently gruff attitudes sheltered a sensitive core of emotions. His proficiency as an actor was especially acute during the 1960s, with his flexibility to dominate the screen, with a seemingly effortless manner, in a variety of powerful, virile portrayals.
Quinn had several major film successes in the 1950s, as evidenced by his two best supporting actor Academy Awards for his portrayals of Eufemio Zapata in Viva Zapata!, and of Paul Gauguin in Lust for Life. He won international fame, and a Venice Film Festival award, as the carnival strongman Zampano in Federico Fellini's La Strada, and received an Academy Award nomination for best actor in Wild Is the Wind.
When Quinn was six years old, he attended a Catholic church and thought he wanted to become a priest. But at the age of eleven, he joined the Pentecostals in the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (the Pentecostal followers of Aimee Semple McPherson).
Views
Quotations:
"Having talent is like having blue eyes. You don't admire a man for the colour of his eyes. I admire a man for what he does with his talent."
"On the stage, you have to find truth, even if you have to lose the audience."
"I have lived in a flurry of images, but I will go out in a freeze frame."
Personality
Quinn presented a rugged, vigorous, and dignified demeanor readily adaptable to a variety of ethnic roles.
Physical Characteristics:
Quinn was a brown-eyed, six-foot and three-inch hight.
Connections
Quinn's first wife was the adopted daughter of Cecil B. DeMille, the actress Katherine DeMille. They met during the filming The Buccaneer. The couple had five children - Christopher, Christina, Catalina, Duncan, and Valentina.
In 1965, Quinn and DeMille divorced, because of his affair with Jolanda Addolori. Anthony and Jolanda married in 1966. They had three children - Francesco, Danny, and Lorenzo Quinn. During the marriage, Quinn had two children with Friedel Dunbar - Sean Quinn and Alexander Anthony Quinn. He also had two children with his secretary, Katherine Benvin - a daughter, Antonia Patricia Rose Quinn, and a son, Ryan Nicholas Quinn. His marriage with Addolori finally ended in 1997. Then he married Katherine Benvin in 1997.
Father:
Francisco Quinn
Mother:
Manuela (Nellie) Oaxaca
Spouse:
Katherine Benvin
child:
Christopher Quinn
child:
Christina Quinn
child:
Catalina Quinn
child:
Duncan Quinn
child:
Valentina Quinn
child:
Francesco Quinn
Francesco was known for his role as Rhah in Oliver Stone’s Academy Award-winning Platoon.
