An actor of commanding stature who appeared in more than 120 movies. Although not a conventionally handsome man, Anthony Quinn projected a strong, almost menacing, masculinity that initially brought him a great many minor roles as a villain. He rose to fame, however, by virtue of his combined machismo and vulnerability, demonstrating his acting skills in a number of impressive supporting roles during the 1950s, later graduating to starring character parts. He was born Anthony Rudolph Oaxaca Quinn in Chihuahua, Mexico, to a Mexican mother and Irish father. His family moved to the United States while he was still a child, his father eventually finding work as a cameraman in Hollywood.
Anthony Quinn's first taste of acting came when he was a high school student on the east side of Los Angeles. His first professional acting job was in the 1935 Los Angeles theater production of Clean Beds, starring MAE WEST. The following year he began to appear in bit parts in low-budget films such as Parole!, Night Waitress, and Sworn Enemy. He soon made a modest breakthrough, however, when he played a Cheyenne warrior in CECIL B. DEMILLE's The Plainsman (1936). Anthony Quinn married DeMille's daughter soon after in 1937 (they divorced in 1965), but the marriage did not seem to affect his career. The actor continued to play small roles, usually native characters of one kind or another, in roughly 20 films during the next decade without attracting much attention.
It wasn't until he left Los Angeles and headed for Broadway that his career began to improve. He starred in The Gentleman from Athens and scored a critical success. He topped that with a highly praised run as Stanley Kowalski in the Chicago production of A Streetcar Named Desire, after which he went on the road with the play for nearly two years.
By the time he returned to Hollywood, Anthony Quinn had earned a reputation as a good actor. He landed a significant role in The Brave Bulls (1951) but really came into his own as a film actor when he starred along with MARLON BRANDO in Viva Zapata! (1952) and won his first Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. Despite his Oscar, starring roles were still eluding Anthony Quinn, and he decided to try his luck in Europe's burgeoning film industry. It was Federico Fellini's La Strada (1956) that made him an international star and led to a new appreciation of Anthony Quinn's talents.
Back in Hollywood the actor played the painter Paul Gauguin in Lust for Life (1956) and won another Best Supporting Actor Oscar. He went on to play important supporting roles in films such as Last Train from Gun Hill (1959), Guns of Navarone (1961), Becket (1964), and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Anthony Quinn's father-in-law even gave him a break by offering him the chance to direct CHARLTON HESTON and YUL BRYNNER in The Buccaneer (1958), but the Cecil B. DeMille production was a bomb.
Anthony Quinn's solid performances and good reviews in a string of hit films during the late 1950s and early 1960s led to starring character roles in movies such as Barabbas (1962), Requiem for a Heavyweight (1963), Zorba the Greek (1964), The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968), and The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969). These and other films propelled him to the critical and popular apogee of his movie career during the 1960s.
He continued to star in films throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but the movies weren't as good and the box-office receipts were usually worse. At best the films were mediocre, for example, A Walk in the Spring Rain (1970), Across 110th Street (1971), and the poor but popular The Greek Tycoon (1978). At worst, they were truly awful, for example, R.P.M. (1970), The Don Is Dead (1973), and the big-budget disaster Mohammed, Messenger of God (1977).
Anthony Quinn appeared much less frequently in films during the 1980s, mostly starring in foreign productions such as The Salamander (1983) and Valentra (1984). Though the actor worked on live television during the late 1940s and in primetime TV in the early 1970s, he ignored the medium in the 1980s, instead returning to the stage to star in a musical version of Zorba the Greek (1983–86), including a triumphant run on Broadway. During the 1980s, he came to be a highly regarded sculptor and painter, exhibiting his work throughout the United States.
Although he would go on to make more than a dozen more films before his death in 2001, there were few highlights. He appeared in the four-volume Hercules (1994), played both Onassis (The Switch, 1989) and Onassis's father (Onassis, 1988), starred in the television remake of The Old Man and the Sea (1990), and was the patriarch of the winemaking family in A Walk in the Clouds (1995).
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