Quinn Succeeded on His Talent and Persona

You’ve heard of earth mothers? Anthony Quinn was an earth father.

The eternal peasant, with a sweaty brow, a tanned, craggy face the texture of canyon walls, he appeared to be sculpted out of the loam by the wind and the water. He was an offspring of the planet’s actual geology, as perdurable as iron ore, as permanent as the hard labor required to get it out. It seems almost a surprise that he died Sunday at 86 of respiratory failure; we always thought he was forever.

Death can come for Zorba the Greek? Hmmm, there may be something more to this “death” thing than most baby boomers care to admit.

To see him was not particularly to love him or to fear him or to hate him; it was to feel him. Quinn’s specialty was the almost wordless projection of temperate masculine force, a father’s gravitas, a brother’s loyalty, a boxer’s stamina, a gladiator’s courage, a saboteur’s guile and will to violence. At the same time, he seldom played bad men, because in some way the camera caught the justice in his eyes. You knew he knew what bad men never do: how much life can hurt.

It could, too. He was born poor in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1915, to a Mexican mother and a Mexican-Irish father. That couldn’t have been fun. The family eventually turned toward el norte and he grew up in East Los Angeles, seething with talent and ambition but somewhat limited by his ethnicity.

Quinn got himself into movies in the most humble of ways, as an extra, though in the meantime he had passed through a number of colorful jobs that look good on any resume, particularly a real man’s: hod carrier, construction worker, boxer, taxi driver and so forth.

He was handsome, yes, with a high forehead, piercing eyes, a complexion that photographed dark, and a kind of solemn majesty. But he was also, uh, different. He didn’t look like us, “us” being the almost completely pale-pigmented audience of the movies in the year of his first halting successes, 1936. In his first few roles, no fewer than three of them are identified by type, not name: Extra, Gangster and Cheyenne Warrior. That year he also played Zingo Browning in “Parole.”

It was in “The Plainsman”--Cecil B. DeMille’s 1936 epic, in which he was Cheyenne Warrior--that he met his future father-in-law, the mighty Cecil B. himself. It was in the next year that Quinn married the first of his three wives, DeMille’s adopted daughter, the actress Katherine DeMille, to whom he would remain married for 19 years and by whom he would have three of his 13 children.

But if anyone--including, possibly, Quinn himself--thought a powerful dad-in-law would help him rise in the movie business, that hope proved mistaken and he continued in small character parts in B-movies such as “Waikiki Wedding,” “Bulldog Drummond in Africa,” “Television Spy” and “Texas Rangers Ride Again.”

What changed it? Those kinds of scrappy, now-forgotten second features were filled with young hungry actors, some of them more talented, some of them better connected, some of them handsomer. Yet we know none of their names and remember none of their faces and three days after Anthony Quinn dies, we are paying tribute to him.

It was that Quinn had found a niche where he could live and work and get to know people. He became the Foreign Guy. Not so foreign, of course, that he’s frightening or unknowable; yet at the same time not so familiar that he’s not exotic, dark, sexy, somehow that most charismatic of character types, the mythic “Other” whose difference illuminates our own sameness.

It was in this archetype where Quinn prospered for years. He was the dark one, a pirate, an Indian, a Turk, even that most foreign of all, an artist (Gauguin in “Lust for Life”).

And Zorba.

Of course by the time he got that epic role in 1964, he’d been a full international movie star for at least a decade. It was probably Fellini’s “La Strada,” coming right after his Oscar-winning performance in “Viva Zapata!,” as the Mexican revolutionary’s dissolute brother, that got him into the elite tier, although in the busy climate of the last years of the big studio production system, he made a dozen other films between the two. Although the next few movies weren’t outstanding, he really took off in the very late ‘50s and early ‘60s, battling the Romans in “Barabbas,” helping Gregory Peck blow up “The Guns of Navarone” and helping Peter O’Toole conquer the Middle East in “Lawrence of Arabia.”

“Zorba” was the capstone of this great period. Possibly not his best role and not even his most rewarded (he got no Oscar for it, only a nomination), it was certainly his most memorable. Alexis Zorba, the creation of the novelist Nikos Kazantzakis in Michael Cacoyannis’s film version, seemed to personify the mighty Quinn in one of those rare, perfect unions of man and part: energetic, unperturbable, loud, attractive, graceful, earthy. Zorba was an enabler: So mighty was his life force, he lifted the repressed out of themselves, he restored the ruined, he ordered love to blossom with a tyrant-father’s ferocity, and it did.

And boy, could he dance.

Actually, he couldn’t dance a lick. But when Quinn did his Zorba-shimmy on the beach, it was the dance equivalent of non-singer Rex Harrison warbling throatily in “My Fair Lady” (he beat out Quinn for the Oscar that year). There was such majestic electricity in the big man’s body as it seemed to draw wattage from the earth itself, as his hands rose unself-consciously and began to track the rhythm of the cosmos, while at same time there vibrated from the nexus of his body some majestic vibration of life. You saw a man who could not be killed, who would spread his seed profusely, who had no time for an inner life and in any case mistrusted inner lives, and whose sheer lust for life would see him through any mortal storm.

It is said, snippily, that Quinn liked that role so much he played it for the rest of his career. I would answer that he’d basically been playing it already for 10 years when it arrived, so what’s the difference? That is a thing that stars have that actors don’t: a persona.

Who remembers most of the movies that came next? How’s about “Across 110th Street” or “The Marseille Contract” or “Tigers Don’t Cry” or any of the dozens of other films he made after “Zorba”? Who even remembers Zorba?

But Quinn on the beach, celebrating all that is possible and willfully exiling all that is tragic, that’s a star’s turn, and in memory it turns and turns and turns.