Now I just wish I could bring out the real me,” says Danny Quinn, sitting next to the large windows of his villa on Appia Antica, one of those glimpses of Rome so beautiful it feels like a whole other world. On the walls are paintings by his father, Hollywood legend Anthony Quinn; There are photographs on the furniture where she is with him. “The idea that the world has of me probably reflects the idea that I had some time ago. That this is not enough. My father acted in more than 300 films. I thought: if I don’t do at least 280, people will start comparing.” He talks about quantum physics, religions… Photo
TRAVELING WITH DADDY “But he willingly talks about his past: “Wherever we traveled, my father was greeted with admiration, everyone welcomed us, they knew who we were. It seemed to me that the world was a big family. And also because he never pretended to be a star. He was impetuous, passionate and a friend to everyone. The son of Mexican immigrants, he never forgot the modesty of his origins.”
And then? “I went to college in New York. I’ve always wanted to write, and now I’m going to really do it. But then other opportunities presented themselves to me, and I took advantage of them. I went to acting school for two years, and then I was invited to an action movie. The director was Paul Glaser, the Starsky series. Starsky and Hutch. It starred Laurence Fishburne, who later did it. MatrixStephen Lang, who arrived at Avatars. But the film was not a success. I thought it was my fault, I wasn’t good enough. And instead of immediately jumping back into acting and doing a few more auditions, I went back to acting school. These disasters happen when you don’t have a mentor to guide you.”
Her father was Anthony Quinn: didn’t he give her advice? “Being a great artist does not mean being able to teach.”
But the parent can at least encourage it. “We were different. When he told me that we need to fight in life, I thought: “I’m not like you. You came from the street, I’m Anthony Quinn’s son! I grew up in the best hotels in the world. I wasn’t starving, I can’t have the same motivation as you.” He said life was hard, but in my opinion he made it hard for himself, he was the first to realize he could never do enough.”
In 1989 you were invited to host San Remo. “That year the Festival was entrusted to the “children of art”: GianMarco Tognazzi, Rosita Celentano….”
Wasn’t it humiliating to go on stage just because of your last name? “I lived in Los Angeles, I didn’t really care. And I knew nothing about how to stage a play, we were forced to rehearse for only two weeks, I remember the attitude towards us was somewhere between “who cares” and “in the end, it’s their business.”
How did acting end? “In the mid-nineties, all my peers took off, Brad Pitt, Robert Downey Jr. But not me. I began to compare, move from one excess to another, if I got the role, I got excited, if not, I fell into depression. As a result, I fell into a long depression.”
He speaks as if he alone faced everything, although he has so many brothers. “I never had the experience of working in a large family with children, which my father had with other women. But recently I tried to contact them and found out that not only do they not talk to each other, but they don’t even want to talk about him. I didn’t realize he left such wounds.”
Quinn had other women and children, even when he lived with her, her two brothers and your mother. “I first heard about it when I was 16, and only because my parents were arguing loudly. They never sat us down to explain how things were.”
What did he hear? “Only there was a different ‘situation’.”
Did he feel betrayed? “I began to fear that he would abandon us, like he did with his first family when he met my mother.”
How many children did your father have? “In total we… have to be counted every time… I would say 13. He had five children from his first wife, the second was my mother and three of us were born, he had two with a French woman, one with a German and two with him assistant. But it seems there are two more in Mexico City.”
Why do you think he had so many women? “Actually, the photographer explained this to me (Adolfo Franzo, author of the shots on these pages, ed.). My dad knew him and once told him, “You need to let my kids know that I want to feel young.”
And did you, Danny, manage to recover from depression? “I was prescribed Prozac, it gave me a feeling of artificial inner peace, as if nothing that happened could affect me. I stopped day after day.”
Did you feel better? “Not now. It took me a while to realize that we are much more than what we appear to be, or what people see us as through the role we can play. That’s why great actors like Daniel Day- “Lewis or Jim Carrey are no longer actors. We are not what we do.”
Today he is 59 years old. He married his wife Nancy in 2016 and has a 5-year-old daughter, Luna. What does he do? “I am planning to make a documentary to talk about the impact my father had on the world and on us children. And then I record a podcast that talks about rediscovering your inner self. I would like everyone to understand how important it is to be in search, in motion. And that this is possible by going deeper into the interior.”
He wants to write too, right? “Yes, in a couple of years. I will write a book, it will be called Real life can begin even at 60 years old“
Paola Manciagli
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