By Gary Geyer

Background:

Dennis Quaid was born in Houston Texas on April 9, 1954. That makes him 53 years old —in the early stages of being a 50plus person.

Things are going great for Dennis now, but that hasn’t always been the case.

The cocaine years

“I’ve come through periods where I lived this secret life”, Dennis explains, referring to his addiction to cocaine. “I was hiding that, or at least thought I was, and there’s a lot of shame that went with the behavior of that. What I had at the time was not really an authentic life, but a secret life until it all came out. T here’s this feeling of shame, when you’re trying to hide something that can’t be uttered.”

Why me?

Dennis was asked if the shame about his addiction turned into anger.
“Well, I never struck anybody,” he said. “No. Mostly, I was mad at God, you know? Why was I in this predicament? I knew it was all my own fault, but at the same time I wasn’t thinking straight. I was caught in a place, living a life that I didn’t want to live but couldn’t escape.”

It was just before his marriage to Meg Ryan that Dennis decided he had to get a grip on the situation. He entered rehab and fortunately managed to get through it.
“I took a year off to get my life back together,” he said.

However, when it came time to find a movie, it took Dennis another year to get hired.

Like starting over

” Hollywood has a very short memory,” Dennis said. “If you’re not out there in the marketplace, they move on. I was surprised to find it really tough going. In a way I had to start over.”

“I had taken time off and I thought I could pick up where I left off. I really had to start rebuilding again and the scripts weren’t coming my way like they used to be, back then. That was kind of a cold awakening for me and so I was scrambling for parts.”

“It was a struggle to find good roles and it was all the more frustrating because I was married to someone who was getting handed everything on a silver platter. It made it so much harder emotionally and psychologically for me.”

The split

In case you missed the tabloid frenzy, here’s a quick rundown:

Meg had an affair with Russell Crowe while they were making a movie together.

The tabloids had a field day.

Dennis, Meg and Russell became regulars in gossip columns, celebrity magazines and tabloid magazine and TV shows.

Supposedly Dennis publicly thanked Russell Crowe for stealing his wife because, he says, it forced him to realize how troubled their marriage was.

It was hard to separate fact from fiction. It also didn’t much matter

“This was my first taste of anything like that,” Dennis said. “It was no fun.” One day, he said, he heard a noise outside his house and discovered a van filled with cameras and recording equipment parked at the curb. Often, he said, tag-team cars of paparazzi would follow him around town.

Eventually the tabloid furor died down and the followers and the vans moved on to their next victim. “They’re working on Winona Ryder now,” Dennis said.

Dennis and Meg have one son, Jack, and they now share custody of him. They are on friendly terms. Meg and Russell have moved on and this past year, Dennis has remarried.

A Hollywood ending

He had it all: Drug addiction, a bad marriage and a failing career. All of that is in the past as he remains circumspect. Dennis seems to be having the best time, professionally, after his prior hard knocks.

“Now is a really good time for me,” he says.

Miscellaneous Bio stuff

Making music

When not acting, Dennis likes to think of himself as a musician. and occasionally performs with his band, Dennis Quaid and the Sharks.

Every once in a while Quaid and his band manage to hit the road “getting my Elvis fantasies out of the way.”

“Because it’s a live performance, I look at doing music on stage as my substitute for theatre because it’s a live experience with an audience.”

Dennis trivia

When singing with his band, he always plays with bare feet in order to feel comfortable as if playing in his living room.

Making movies: You gotta love it

“Although I love making movies I find the process of making them an excruciating experience. You’re always waiting around for something and then when you get there, you find out that what’s holding up the delay is that something doesn’t work. So you’ve got to work out this problem, then you go to the next thing and you’ve got to work out the next little problem. But I got to tell you, I love it. What they pay me for is for that excruciating experience of waiting around, while the acting part is free.”

A “sports” movie that isn’t a sports movie

Of all the films Dennis has made, The Rookie is one of his favorites. “The thing I like about it is that it’s not a sports movie, even though it’s about sports. It’s just a great story about unfilled dreams, which we all have. This guy got a chance to do it in real life. It’s a beautiful tale– very fulfilling.

On watching his own movies

”A lot of actors say they don’t watch their finished movies, but they’re lying. I watch them. But when they come on TV, I sort of, like, flip the channels. I’ll watch for a couple minutes, and turn on something else. After seeing it about three or four times, that’s what you do.” <<