There has always been a resistance among some inhibited Anglo-Saxons to the rumbustious personality of Anthony Quinn, who died on June 3rd aged 86. Some, however, like Basil (Alan Bates), the buttoned-up English writer in Zorba the Greek (1964), gradually became intoxicated by his life-force character. In fact, there were few better noble savages in Hollywood movies.
When he emerged as a leading performer in the 1950s, constantly roaring for attention and sympathy, following more than 10 years as an all-purpose, ethnic supporting actor, he was the antithesis of introspective stars like Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando and James Dean, and reserved English ones such as Rex Harrison and David Niven. Despite having lived in the United States since childhood, the Mexican-born actor hardly ever played an American, except a native one. His most famous portrayals were as Greeks, Mexicans, Frenchmen, Italians, Arabs and even an Inuk.
He was born in Chihuahua, of poor Irish-Mexican parentage. His maternal grandmother was a Cherokee; his father, who spoke Spanish with an Irish accent, fought with Pancho Villa.
When Anthony Quinn was a boy, the family arrived in California as migrant workers picking grapes. After his father died, he did a lot of odd jobs, including shining shoes, boxing professionally at 16, having lied about his age, and preaching for the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in the Mexican neighbourhoods of Los Angeles. He taught himself literature, music and painting, and decided to become an architect after meeting Frank Lloyd Wright.
But the taste for acting diverted him. After studying with Michael Chekhov, and performing with small theatre groups, he was given the wordless role of a prisoner knifed to death in a gangster picture called Parole! (1936). As Paramount wanted actors who could pass as native Americans, he pretended to be a pure Cheyenne to get a role as a chief in Cecil B. DeMille's The Plainsman (1936) starring Gary Cooper.
The same year, he married DeMille's adopted daughter Katherine, although his father-in-law did little to advance his career, not only to counteract any suggestion of nepotism, but because he did not think much of his acting talent.
His parts consisted mainly of foreign heavies or native Americans in a number of Paramount films, dying in almost all of them. "I was the bad guy's bad guy," he said. "I rarely made it to the final reel without being dispatched by a gun or a knife or a length of twine, typically administered by a rival hood." Even in DeMille's Union Pacific (1939), in which he had a small role as a gambler's hatchet man, he died at the hands of Joel McCrea.
In 1941, his first child, Christopher, drowned in a swimming pool, aged three; he and Katherine went on to have four more children.
His first lead was as an illiterate horsebreeder in a small-budget film called Black Gold (1947), in which Katherine played his wife. However, at the start of America's anti-communist witchhunt, his leftish leanings made him decide to leave Hollywood and return to the stage. He toured in Born Yesterday, and attended the Actors' Studio, where he got to know Elia Kazan. Kazan then chose him to replace Marlon Brando, who had gone into films, as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, which he played for almost two years on Broadway.
His return to the screen was in Robert Rossen's The Brave Bulls (1951). "The supporting cast was entirely Mexican, and I was thrilled to be in such company," he commented.
"After so many years as the token Latin on the set, I found tremendous security in numbers. For the first time, I belonged." This was followed by his Oscar-winning supporting role in Kazan's Viva Zapata! (1952), in which he played Eufemio Zapata, the hard-drinking, ill-disciplined brother of the hero (Brando).
In 1954, after a few more bandit movies, he made two epics in Italy, Ulysses and Attila, as well as Federico Fellini's La Strada. In the latter, he was superb as Zampano, the whoring, drunken itinerant strongman who ignores the simple-minded girl (Giulietta Masina) he has put to work as a clown. Then it was back to the bullring in Budd Boetticher's The Magnificent Matador (1955), in which, as a great Mexican matador, he took to the hills because "fear is eating him".
In 1955, he won his second Oscar as supporting actor for his relatively brief, but powerful, performance as Paul Gauguin in Vincente Minnelli's Lust For Life, sending sparks flying while clashing temperamentally with Kirk Douglas's Van Gogh.
In 1958, an ailing Cecil B. DeMille handed over the direction of The Buccaneer (the remake of his 1938 film) to his son-in-law. Although Anthony Quinn is credited as director, DeMille, who died a month after the opening, cut the film to suit his own tastes, turning it from a more intimate, political drama into a yawning pirate epic.
After playing a Greek colonel in The Guns Of Navarone (1961), and a Bedouin leader in Lawrence Of Arabia (1962), he applied himself to Michael Cacoyannis's Zorba The Greek (1964), based on the Nikos Kazantzakis novel. As Alexis Zorba, the passionate, free-spirited Cretan peasant with an earthy laugh and a lust for life, he reached his apotheosis.
According to Anthony Quinn, he himself invented the film's celebrated dance with the sliding step. He had broken a bone in his foot the day before shooting began, and found that if he dragged it along, it would not cause too much pain. "I held out my arms, in a traditional Greek stance, and shuffled along the sands. Soon Alan Bates picked up on the move...We were born-again Greeks, joyously celebrating life. We had no idea what we were doing, but it felt right, and good."
In 1965, he divorced Katherine and married Iolanda Addolari, an Italian costume designer. It was a marriage that lasted 30 years, and produced three sons. But fidelity was never his strong point, and he also had three children by two other women, and affairs with, among others, French actress Dominique Sanda and Pia Lindstrom, Ingrid Bergman's daughter.
Although he kept working, he admitted: "The parts dried up as I reached my 60th birthday, loosely coinciding with my growing disinclination to pursue them. Indeed, I could not see the point in playing old men on screen when I rejected the role for my self." Anthony Quinn then concentrated on painting and sculpture, many of which sold for thousands of dollars. "Some days, I paint like a Mexican . . . I steal from everybody - Picasso, Kandinsky . . . I steal, but only from the best," he commented.
In 1996, after an acrimonious divorce from Iolanda, and a heart bypass operation, Anthony Quinn, aged 80, had a son and a daughter by his former secretary Kathy Benvin - making him a father 13 times over, by five different women, and continuing, as he always did, to blur the line between his on and off-screen "earth father" personality.
Anthony Rudolph Oaxaca Quinn: born 1915; died, June 2001