Dennis Quaid rocketed to fame playing an astronaut, but fell back to earth with a bump. Now he's riding high again and loving it, he tells LESLEY O'TOOLE
KEY POINTS:
It was probably not a coincidence that Dennis Quaid, famously a purveyor of effortless masculinity on screen, garnered the best reviews of his career for playing a 50s, closeted homosexual in 2002's Far From Heaven. He also won three American critics' groups awards, was nominated for Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe awards and his career hasn't faltered since. The same year he graced the well-liked studio family film The Rookie, and two years later had another mainstream blockbuster, The Day After Tomorrow, plus the winning indie film In Good Company.
Smart People is the second of Quaid's five 2008 releases, a year he calls, not without good reason, "a perfect storm".
Quaid didn't understand why director Noam Murro offered him the role of the lugubrious, isolated college professor Lawrence Wetherhold in Smart People (which also stars girls of the moment Sarah Jessica Parker and Ellen Page). He was so intrigued that he agreed to a meeting with him just to ascertain why.
"I was thinking, 'I really don't get it at all', and 'Why do you see me playing this?'." He half-admits now that he was scared. "I really was going to bow out of it. I hate to use the word 'risk', because what's risky about acting? Being in combat, now that's risky. I felt I needed to do something that maybe I was afraid to do, or felt I wasn't quite right for. To step out into the ether and do something new.
"And I did identify with him emotionally, in some ways, in terms. I think I had been at different times in my life, to a certain degree, more or less sort of emotionally stuck, or shut down."
This is not the self-important chatter of a movie star who has had a few box office disappointments. Quaid is a survivor, professionally and personally, and today breathes almost meditatively as he takes in the Santa Monica ocean view. "Can't be bad," he murmurs. He might indeed be talking about life as a 54-year-old with 6-month-old twins and a third wife, estate agent Kimberly Buffington, from his home state Texas, with whom he seems blissfully happy, or talking about the state of his career.
"There were just so many great scripts that it was hard to pass on," he says; not the sort of thing you often hear Hollywood actors say. "Movies seem to be happening to me rather than me going out there and saying, 'Well, I'm going to play this'."
Earlier this year Quaid starred in British director Peter Travis's Rashomon-style thriller Vantage Point, in which he played a secret-service guy not averse to jokes about his age. This summer he will star in his latest summer blockbuster, GI Joe, opposite Sienna Miller and Victoria's Secret model Karolina Kurkova. "It's a three-movie deal," he jokes. "A big popcorn type of tent-pole action movie. It's not deep. Action and cleavage." His other 2008 releases are The Horsemen ("I call it a horror movie with a heart," he says) and The Express (an old-fashioned, feel-good American sporting tale).
That Quaid is still uncommonly good-looking for a man in his mid-50s might be key. But mostly he likes to attribute his current run to tenacity. "I was a guy back in the 80s who was one movie away from a huge career, which at that time didn't happen. In the 90s, I worked a lot, but it was kind of, 'get out there and dig and find things'. Then I guess The Rookie and Far From Heaven were referred to as my comeback. I look around and a lot of the people I started in the business with, I have no clue where they are right now. So much of it has to do with luck and I have been extremely lucky, but a large part of it is also just hanging in there."
But he is taking a break for now, to focus on family matters and to make a cataclysmic change in his life moving home to Texas.
"I raised my first son [Jack, 16, with second wife Meg Ryan] there [in Los Angeles] and it's okay, but Texas is more relaxed and family-oriented. Also, as I grow older, I put all life's bullshit aside. I think the process of the laying off of the bullshit starts around 40. Before that, most men have their heads stuck in their ass. After 40, you see things differently. You've found yourself. You're accepting yourself and what you got from life."
I sense he will be happy to leave LA behind, after last year when his nine-day-old twins were given an accidental but near-fatal overdose at the city's Cedars-Sinai Hospital.
Quaid and his wife have started a charitable foundation aimed at the prevention of similar mistakes. "In a way, the twins are going to change the world because of what happened to them," he says. But Quaid has been forever altered by the experience, which thrust him into a different kind of spotlight than that produced by his then-wife Meg Ryan's affair with Russell Crowe, begun on the film Proof of Life. He and Ryan later reconciled briefly before divorcing in 2001.
Quaid had not enjoyed such an incandescent media spotlight, albeit for the wrong reasons, since the 80s. "I was the hot guy then, for a while," he says of earning considerable artistic kudos for the astronaut drama The Right Stuff and legions more female fans for his steamy cavortings with Ellen Barkin in The Big Easy.
How does he think he copes with his fame this time around? "I'm a lot better at it now. I sort of sabotaged my own celebrity before. I really didn't want to have it. It got really crazy there for a while so I asked God to take it away and he did. I didn't handle it very well."
As Quaid was making inroads in the acting world, he was knee-deep in the musical one, with a touring band called the Eclectics. With music came drugs, a cocaine problem and rehab. But it was a happy time too. He met Ryan when she played his love interest in 1987's Innerspace and they married in 1990, a year after When Harry Met Sally made her a huge star. Quaid's career could not come close to emulating his wife's, who apparently couldn't put a foot wrong. In 1993 he lost 18kg to play Doc Holliday in Wyatt Earp and later confessed that the experience led to what he termed "manorexia".
Quaid was not born to the stage. Following a blue-collar upbringing in Houston where his father was an electrician, Quaid went to college but dropped out to hitch a ride with his older brother Randy, already a working actor, when he made the move to Los Angeles.
If his career was initially based on looks, Quaid soon proved he was more than met the eye, notably in the film of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff. He says it is still his favourite of his 50-plus films, "because it was such a boyhood thing, wanting to be an astronaut. I read the book before they even mentioned the movie, and I thought: 'Wow, I'd love to play Gordon Cooper if they ever do this.' Then I got it. It lasted nine months and was just a really exciting time."
Quaid's obsession with flying persists to this day. He earned his private pilot's licence shortly afterwards and happily shuttles himself and his family to his favourite refuge, a ranch in Montana. In cowboy boots and jeans, he looks right at home on the range. When in full kickback mode, he draws, paints, writes, rides and plays golf. Or he did before the twins came along. Professionally, he insists, he has made no such modifications.
Finally, his famous all-American grin breaks through.
"And it's not a real job, for God's sake. Life's really wonderful if you can avoid that."
- INDEPENDENT
