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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.''