Anthony Quinn

Anthony Quinn (1915-2001), American film actor famous for playing rugged, earthy roles. He was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, of an Irish-Mexican father and a Mexican-Native American mother. After the 1913 Pancho Villa uprising, the family moved to Los Angeles, where Quinn’s father, a painter, became a Hollywood cameraman. Quinn took manual jobs to pay his way through high school, then took up acting while playing saxophone in the backing band of the American radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.

Quinn made his stage debut in 1936, and his first film, Parole, the same year. Craggy and masculine, with a broken nose dating from his time as a boxer, he was soon in demand to play a range of characters of many races or nationalities—Cheyennes (as in the Cecil B. DeMille film The Plainsman, 1937), Italians, Panamanians, Frenchmen (The Buccaneer, 1938), and Spaniards, to name a few. What his acting lacked in subtlety it made up for in gloweringly uncouth swagger.

Quinn married DeMille’s daughter Katherine in 1937; the couple divorced in 1965. Periodically he returned to stage acting, making his Broadway debut in 1947; he played leads in Born Yesterday (1948) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1952), and starred opposite Laurence Olivier in Becket (1960). On screen he was still cast in ethnic parts, but the roles got better; he earned Best Supporting Actor Academy Awards (Oscars) as elder brother to Marlon Brando in Viva Zapata! (1952) and for his portrayal of Gauguin in Lust for Life (1956).

Increasingly Quinn sought work in Europe. Federico Fellini gave him what is widely regarded as his finest role as the brutal travelling showman in La Strada (1954), although it was a low-budget Greek film that indelibly fixed his image, as he exuberantly acted everyone else off the screen (and earned an Oscar nomination) as the lusty, larger-than-life Zorba the Greek (1964). After that, his more subtle efforts—such as the hapless pirate captain in A High Wind in Jamaica (1965)—were largely disregarded.