A TRIBUTE TO LEGENDARY ACTOR - ANTHONY QUINN
Manuel Antonio Rodolfo Quinn Oaxaca, known
professionally as Anthony Quinn, is an Irish-Mexican-American actor. Born April
21, 1915, in Chihuahua, Mexico, to an Irish immigrant father from County Cork
and a Mexican mother during the Mexican Revolution, to Manuela
"Nellie" and Francisco "Frank" Quinn. Quinn and his family
left Mexico for the United States shortly after his birth, eventually settling
in Los Angeles, California. When he was 9 years old, his father died. Quinn
then worked odd jobs to support the family.
When he was six years old, Quinn attended a Catholic
church and even considered becoming a priest. However, at the age of 11, he
joined the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, a Pentecostal
denomination founded and led by evangelical pastor Aimee Semple McPherson. Over
time, Quinn played in the church's band and was an evangelist's training
preacher. "I knew most of the great actresses of my day, and not one of
them could touch her," Quinn once said of McPherson, who is credited with
inspiring Zorba's dramatic outstretched hand gesture.
Quinn grew up first in El Paso, Texas, then in East
Los Angeles and the Echo Park area of Los Angeles, California. Attended Hamel
Street Elementary School, Belvedere Junior High School, Polytechnic High
School, and Belmont High School in Los Angeles with future baseball player and
General Hospital star John Beradino, but dropped out before graduating. Tucson
High School in Arizona awarded him an honorary high school diploma in June
1987.
As a teenager, Quinn took up boxing professionally
to earn money, then studied under Frank Lloyd Wright at the art and
architectural designer's Arizona home and his Wisconsin studio in Taliesin.
Both became friends. When Quinn mentioned that he was drawn to acting, Wright
encouraged him. Quinn said a film studio offered him $800 a week and didn't
know what to do. Wright replied, "Take it, you won't make that much of
me." In a 1999 interview at a private screening with Robert Osborne, Quinn
said his contract was only $300 a week.
In 1936, Quinn ventured into acting. That year he
starred alongside Mae West in the play Clean Beds and appeared in the film
Parole! This opened the door to other film roles, often playing a bad boy with
an "ethnic" background. He is known for portraying earthy and
passionate characters "marked by brutal and elemental brutality" in
several critically acclaimed films in Hollywood and abroad.
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