In Total Demand

He has a face like a bloodhound that has just eaten an escaped convict, an image that was once permitted on movie screens only if the dog died in the end. But movies are artier than ever, and the rough features of Anthony Quinn, which have long hidden a consummately skillful actor, are in total demand. He is a leading man now, in films and on Broadway too. Rich and nearly 50, he talks like a teen-aged kid who has just been told he made 700 on his college boards.

"A good actor is a deep-sea diver." he explains. "For years I was content to be the guy pumping the air down to the deep-sea diver. Now I feel I've got to put on the suit myself." He pumped air to Marlon Brando in Viva Zapata! and to Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life, each time winning an Oscar as the year's best supporting actor. He created sworls of off-center violence in dozens of other good movies, from 1943's The Ox-Bow Incident to 1961's The Guns of Navarone. But despite his Oscars and his gold-lettered credits (including La Strada), few people --least of all Anthony Quinn--thought of him as a so-called actor of stature until suddenly there he was up on a Broadway stage as England's King Henry II, exchanging complicated philosophies with Sir Laurence Olivier in Becket.

New Vigor. Once described as an actor always on the verge of being discovered. Quinn has elected to discover himself. "I like what's happening to me now for the first time," he says. "It's the great, wonderful, lovely luxury of learning to think." His language has become pure pate de Strasberg. He delves down into the characters he plays until he is scraping the nails in their soles. "A doctor takes a responsibility when he so much as looks at your throat." he says. "I have to dissect the whole man. I'm responsible for how he walks, looks, talks. I can't do this inside myself. I'm a little bored with my self. I have to get it from outside sources. Otherwise I'd live like a hyena, eating my own entrails."

And there is no busier actor now working With Margaret Leighton, he is doing Broadway's Tchin-Tchin, the story of a man and woman whose absentee spouses are having a love affair. The play opened in October, but Quinn still sits up at night trying to figure out who this man is that he is playing on stage. "I play him five-feet-eleven.'' says Quinn, who is 6 ft. 2 in. '"If I played him Tony Quinn, he would never stand for that cuckoldry.' Last week he decided that the fellow must have had a crippled father whose incapacity had forced the son to work as a youth; and this imaginative insight has given him new vigor in the part, which he goes at with such competitive enthusiasm that he sometimes seems to cast a ham-fisted shadow over the more fragile performance of Margaret Leighton.

He has signed for six new pictures, to be made over the next two years. He opens soon as an Arab chieftain in the much-awaited Lawrence of Arabia. He is also Dino de Laurentiis' Barabbas, giving a taut, disciplined, and sometimes moving performance as the man whose life was spared when Christ died. Requiem for a Heavyweight, completed earlier this year but just released by Producer David Susskind in a maneuver aimed at the Academy Awards, is probably Quinn's best picture. As a punched-out prizefighter, croaking in the high voice of a man who has taken too many on the windpipe, he manages to make the swollen-featured, illiterate pug touchingly appealing. While making the picture. Quinn stood around in seeming torpor for long stretches be tween takes, to the amazement of Fellow Actor Jackie Gleason. Says Quinn defensively: "I can't turn it on and off. Gleason plucks it off the tree and eats it raw. I have to marinate it. It comes very hard for me."

Writer & Patron. Things came hard to him from the beginning. A Mexican with enough Irish in him to make Quinn his real name, he was bora in Chihuahua during Pancho Villa's revolt. Fleeing the country, his 16-year-old mother carried him 500 miles on her back to Juarez and eventually to El Paso, where his 19-year-old father rejoined them. "My youth was all whirlwinds of sand and threatening rain." he says. The family rode a cattle car to California, where they worked m orchards picking fruit and nuts, eating walnut gruel for breakfast and sleeping under the trees at night. When Tony was nine, his father was hit by a car in Los Angeles and killed.

Tony had dozens of jobs and sporadic schooling. As a pole-shaped, 145-lb. teen ager, he became a professional fighter. He won 16 in a row, lost the 17th and quit. Following a self-education program, he read one novel, listened to one symphony and studied one art masterpiece each week. He took up painting. One day, trying to read Shakespeare aloud, he discovered he had a speech impediment. He found his tongue was tied-- attached to the floor of the mouth by too much flesh. He went to a surgeon, had it freed, and worked as a janitor in a drama school in order to learn to speak properly. He was soon the friend and protege of John Barrymore. He married Cecil B. DeMille's daughter, but proudly refused to work for his father-in-law and made it on his own at a different studio, meanwhile giving DeMille four grandchildren.

He now has a gorgeous, $300,000 brick-and-wrought-iron townhouse in Manhattan's east 705, filled with primitive masks and sophisticated paintings by numerous young artists whose work he wants to en courage He owns two harbors and an isthmus in Rhodes, which he discovered when he filmed The Guns of Navarone.

Quinn insists that material possessions mean nothing to him. But maybe they have helped just a little to make him one of the most resoundingly positive people alive. He fairly shouts optimism. "I'm getting tired of negativism in the theater," he says, getting on his hoarse. "I'd like to see a little positivism in the world. If people are so preoccupied with sickness, they should go to the hospital.''

In the early hours. Quinn is now trying to draft two presumably sunshiny musical plays. "I want to say something, and I don't know whether I can do it as an actor. I have a great desire to write." Anthony Quinn will try anything.

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