Leaving L.A.

(We are sorry to note that The Internet Movie Database reports J.C. Quinn died in a car crash in Mexico in February, 2004.)

Originally published in Charlotte Magazine in slightly different form. This version copyright Allan Maurer, 2004.

Quinn, who brought his wife and two daughters to Charlotte in 1995, played John Travolta's uncle in the Mike Nichols film, Primary Colors, and acted in several other films since his arrival. He left home at 17 to escape an abusive alcoholic father and joined the Air Force.

"I didn't have a high school education, so they put me in Intelligence," Quinn said. He spent many Cold War years as a code-breaker and spy, including several years a Far East field agent. "I saw Francis Gary Powers' U2 go down," he said. "I was watching it on the oscilloscope, and blip, it was gone."

Quinn's bio on an internet spy network lists him as a former intelligence agent who became "a big Hollywood star."

Quinn smiled when we told him about it. "I get kind of a kick out of it," he said. He got the acting bug after appearing in his first show in community theater in Nutley, New Jersey in 1967 and "a year later I quit my junior executive job, moved to New York City, took a room over a bar and a dishwashing job in a restaurant and started auditioning. I got the lead in an Off Broadway play my first week."

He moved north in 1968 and performed with the Theater Company of Boston, "which was a very good company in those days, with people like Ralph Waite (The Waltons) and Al Pacino."

After several years of acting, Quinn realized he had raw talent, but "absolutely no technique," so he decided to stop acting and study to hone his craft.

In 1974, he joined the famous Actor's Studio run by Lee Strasberg which taught "The Method," developed by the great Russian actor, director and teacher, Constantine Stanislavski.

The Actor's Studio held "sessions" every Tuesday and Friday morning. Actors did a scene, monologue, or an exercise, Quinn recalled. "You could sit up there and not say anything for an hour and say 'I'm working on silence.' Then you would be critiqued on that. The criterion for the critique was 'what was your objective?'

"You would do a scene from a play, then state what your objective was, then be critiqued by Strasberg, Shelly Winters, whoever was the moderator, and the other students. It was pretty brutal. You had to really be able to take shots to hang in there."

The Secret of Good Acting

The secret of good acting, Quinn told me, is "to be in the moment, living it, as opposed to acting. I see too many young kids push too hard.

"The secret of great acting is leaving yourself available to the moment, being there, available to that thing that never happened before. It's magic. As you get older, you spend your acting life trying to leave yourself alone."

Quinn may not be the most recognizable actor out there, but he has worked with nearly every major film star and a bevy of top directors, from John Cassavettes to James (Titanic) Cameron.

"I'm part of the last generation to have personal contact with the great European tradition," he said. He worked in an unusual mix of art films, serious theater and over 50 Hollywood products including Barfly, Wired, Days of Thunder, Silkwood, The Abyss, Visionquest, and Turner and Hooch, to name a few. His television work included roles in Cheers, Quantum Leap, Miami Vice, Knots Landing, and Cagny and Lacy.

He worked on and off Broadway. Quinn said he and Abyss director Cameron are now good buddies, "but that was not a happy set. I finally had to tell him, this movie may be your life, but to me it's just a job."

Visionquest, directed by Harold Becker, stands out as one of his favorite roles because in it he gives a memorable speech that sums up his life-is-what-you-make-of-it philosophy.

But, Quinn said, "One of my little girls will never forgive me because I killed Hooch (in Turner and Hooch). They do not entirely separate movie making from reality yet." One daughter thought she was the baby she saw daddy with in a movie.

Quinn told about the day he came home and one of the girls said, "Quiet on the set." Then, "Action," and finally, "Cut." Then she said, "You can talk now, daddy."

Another time, his five-year-old woke him in the morning and asked, "Can I have your autograph?"

Quinn met his wife Yoland, a six-foot tall, beautiful restaurant executive, in Key West while working on a film with Goldie Hawn. They married two days after the movie wrapped.

"I decided if I was going to get married and start a family at fifty, I wanted to spend some time with them," he said, explaining why he "semi-retired" and moved to Charlotte in 1995.

He appeared in films directed by Angelica Huston, Timothy Hutton, Tim Matheson, and Jonas and Joshua Pate after the move. He agreed to do Primary Colors, a fictional version of Clinton's first Presidential campaign, "if they flew me home weekends to be with my family."

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