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(1915–2001). Mexican actor.
When he first
arrived in Hollywood, Quinn was visibly foreign, so the conventions of the era
dictated that he play villains—most prominently, as Bob Hope's foil in The
Ghost Breakers and two "Road" movies. But he worked his way up to better
roles, including an Oscar-winning supporting performance in Viva Zapata
(1952)—one of the rare occasions when this Mexican-born actor actually played
a Mexican—and he became a star after a career-defining role in La Strada
(1954). Director Federico Fellini recognized that this homely, ungainly actor
was perfectly suited to play simple, uneducated men of the soil; and, at a time
when Hollywood was struggling to live down its glitzy past and establish itself
as a medium more thoughtful and mature than that brash upstart, television,
Quinn was quickly embraced as the ideal embodiment of guileless sincerity and
gritty realism, seen most sympathetically in his greatest role as Zorba the
Greek (1964). Quinn, in other words, came to represent the very antithesis
of science fiction and fantasy film, which explains why he was never approached
to appear in one of them.
Still, there
was one type of fantasy film that demanded an atmosphere of guileless sincerity
and gritty realism, since it was not permissible to label it as a fantasy film,
and that was the religious epic, where Quinn could always find a home. When not
gazing in awe at a messiah figure, whether it was Jesus Christ in Barrabas
and Jesus of Nazareth or the unseen Mohammed in the controversial Mohammed,
Messenger of God, Quinn picked up other odd credits on the fringes of the
genre, including a supporting role in Kirk DOUGLAS's Ulysses, Quasimodo
in the least memorable version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, an
enigmatic magician in the wretched The Magus, and a Russian pope
striving to avert global disaster in the enjoyably silly The Shoes of the
Fisherman. More often, however, Quinn kept himself busy playing
manipulative mobsters and charming peasants in increasingly less prominent
venues, as the film industry now sought to project its youthful energy more
than its seriousness of purpose. In response, Quinn began devoting more time to
his second career as a painter.
By the early 1990s, when Quinn was reduced to starring in the terrible Bo
Derek vehicle Ghosts Can't Do It, one might have suspected that
his career was over. Yet he performed credibly as a gangster opposite
Arnold SCHWARZENEGGER in Last Action Hero
and, as Zeus, presided with dignity over the television movies that launched
the series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Near the end of his
sixty years of acting, it seems, science fiction film had grown and developed
to the point that it could finally make use of the memorably earthy presence
of Anthony Quinn.
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