The celebration of the 70th birthday of Dennis Quaid (Houston, Texas, USA) this Tuesday, April 9, will have little to do with that of the eighties when his partner, Meg Ryan, rented a small plane in which he placed a large sign that read “Happy Birthday, Dennis” and made it fly over a concert where Quaid and his band, the Eclectics, were playing. This time, the actor, producer and, now, above all, musician, very far from the excesses of Hollywood, wild fame and uncontrolled cocaine, will celebrate in Nashville, Tennessee, where he has decided to settle and live with his fourth wife (40 years his junior), focused on what he likes most: Christian country-rock.
Quaid's life has been quite a journey over these 70 years. The son of Juanita, a real estate agent, and Will, an electrician, already studied dance and theater in high school and was clear about his path at university, in his native Houston, which he abandoned to make the leap to Los Angeles and try to make a career. career that took him a couple of years to start. But since then it has been rolled out, with more than 100 films, series, projects of all kinds (although hardly any nominations for important awards) and future plans; This year he is finally expected to release the long-awaited biopic about Ronald Reagan directed by Sean McNamara in which he steps into the shoes of the famous actor and former president of the United States — along with Penelope Ann Miller, Jon Voight and Mena Suvari, among others—and that has been in the making for more than five years. But cinema – where he has starred in titles such as
Postcards from the Edge, Something to Talk About, Frequency, Dragonheart, Far from Heaven
or the popular
You to London and I to California
– is no longer his great passion. Now he is moved by music and, above all, religion.
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While it is true that Quaid was raised Catholic, it is also true that God was far from him for many years. The eighties and nineties were wild. At just 29 years old, he had already divorced for the first time, from fellow performer PJ Soles. In the eighties he became a heartthrob among actresses and celebrities and, while he was dating Lea Thompson, he crossed paths with Meg Ryan on the street and it was quite a crush. When they coincided in the filming of
The prodigious chip
,
the rest was history. After falling in love, they got married on Valentine's Day 1991 and had their son Jack, now an actor, in April of the following year (in 1990 he already declared to this newspaper that he wanted to be a father: "I know how to take care of children because I am like them"). Together they became a standard bearer of golden Hollywood but, like almost everything in Hollywood, theirs had a lot of papier-mâché. He was unfaithful to her during her marriage on many occasions, and in 2001 her relationship ended after an affair with Russell Crowe, her co-star at the time.
Diana, Princess of Wales, with actors Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan (and her husband, Dennis Quaid) at the premiere of 'When Harry Met Sally' in London, November 1989.Princess Diana Archive (Getty Images )
The Ryan-Quaid romance and marriage became fodder for the tabloids and it was not easy for its protagonists either. He acknowledged years later that the fact that
America's sweetheart
of the nineties achieved meteoric fame was complex to manage. “When we met I was at the top of my game and then my career…” she said, imitating the sound of a car brake, on the US NBC program
Megyn Kelly Today
, in 2018. “And “I have to admit, the truth is that I felt like I disappeared.” Their health didn't give them a break either. To prepare for the role of the tuberculous gunslinger Doc Holliday in
Wyatt Earp
, directed by Lawrence Kasdan in 1994, the actor was forced to lose almost 20 kilos, which led to anorexia nervosa that almost killed him. “He had his arms so thin that he couldn't even get out of a pool,” he said in 2006 in
Best Life
magazine . “For years I was obsessed with what I ate, with how many calories I had.”
And then there were the drugs. A separate chapter that marked Quaid's life (and the “insane”, as he defined it, his relationship with Med Ryan). Years later he has reported on more than one occasion that it was impossible for him to get out of there. In the interview with Kelly, he recalled that he used “cocaine practically every day in the eighties.” "I spent many, many nights screaming at God, 'Please take this away from me and I will never do this again, I only have one hour before I have to go to work.' And then at four in the afternoon he would come back and say: 'Well it's not that bad.' He sought the joy of life, and drugs “were fun, they turned problems into fun, and then they became the problem.”
Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan arrive at the premiere of 'You in London and I in California' in Los Angeles in July 1998. Barry King (Getty Images)
Suddenly, he says, he had a revelation. It was in 1990. “I remember going home and having a kind of experience where I saw myself dead or in jail or losing everything I had, and I didn't want that,” he recalled last summer in an interview in
People
. “I was in a group and we got a record job... They broke up the night they got it, and they broke up because of me, because I wasn't trustworthy,” he confessed. “Then I realized that if I didn't change I was going to be dead in five years. The next day I was in rehab,” he told Kelly. After that voluntary rehabilitation came the return to the roots, to the God of his youth. According to him, addictions are forces that “fill a hole inside people”: “When you overcome addiction, you need something to fill that hole, something that really works, right?” And the divine message came to him in the form of music
Quaid composed the song
On My Way to Heaven
(On the way to heaven) in honor of his mother, Juanita, to let her know that he was okay, that he had found his way again. He re-read the Bible, but also the Koran and other religious texts. “Then I started to develop a personal relationship. He didn't have it before, although he had grown up as a Christian,” he said in that interview in
People
. Hence, he has now released an album called
Fallen: A Gospel Record For Sinners
. “I grew up in a Baptist church, I love the hymns that I remember from my childhood. The songs are a reflection, a self-examination, nothing church. “We all have a relationship with God, whether you are a Christian or not,” he argued.
Dennis Quaid and Laura Savoie at the premiere of the film 'The Long Game' in Austin, Texas, in March 2023. Gary Miller (Getty Images)
His relationship with God has helped him overcome his three divorces (with Soles in 1983, with Ryan in 2001 and with Kimberly Buffington, with whom he married in 2004 and separated in 2018) and also moments of anguish such as the illness of his children. little ones. Quaid and Buffington had twins by surrogate in November 2007, and due to an error the little ones received a dose of blood anticoagulant of 10,000 units, instead of the 10 they had been scheduled for, in two batches. They had to spend a long time in the neonatal ICU at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Now 16 years old, Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace are two completely healthy teenagers. The hospital had to pay $250,000 for each of the children and, after the incident, the actor created the foundation that bears his last name to raise awareness about medical errors.
In interviews, the actor always states that he considers himself a good father, and that he likes raising his children, although now, after his divorces, he does not have them so close. The interpreter married again in June 2020, in the midst of the covid pandemic, in secret. Although they had only been dating for a year, they had planned a wedding in Hawaii that April with his girlfriend, businesswoman Laura Savoie (now 31 years old), but the coronavirus disrupted their plans and they decided to have a pastor bless them in Santa Barbara, California. , next to the sea and without more witnesses. Now they have decided to move south, to Nashville, where Quaid has produced his album (“half country rock, half Christian band,” as he puts it) and feels at home, far from the hills of tinsel town. “Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't see the same sense of community in Hollywood that I saw in the seventies, even the eighties,” he commented in an interview with
Variety
last year. “The city has always been about people in their cars, but today it is even more so. People live in caravans, they are on the phone. There is no communication like before. Los Angeles has been very good to me and I have great friends, but it's hard to make new ones. There is a lot of personal involvement. In Nashville, you know your neighbors,” he argued. “People go to Hollywood to reinvent themselves, to play a role. People come to Nashville to create music where you have to be yourself. So you become more of yourself, and that's a reflection of life here.” And he no longer needs to reinvent himself.