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.