ALL-STAR actor
Dennis Quaid has played a baseball pitcher, a bicycle racer, an Alamo soldier and an astronaut—and hundreds of other roles. And he’s liked every doggone one.
Dennis Quaid remembers his first home run. “It was over right center field,” says the actor, 65, reflecting on his days playing first base and pitcher for his hometown Little League team, the Cardinals, in Houston. “I loved the feel of it, the smell of it.”
Quaid, who still radiates much of the youthful glow and passion of that Little Leaguer from long ago, is as easygoing as they come as he walks around a photo studio in jeans and sneakers. He’s followed by his yearand-a-half-old miniature English bulldog, Peaches.
“I take her everywhere,” he says, then whistles. “Hey, Peaches, come here, babe!” Peaches waddles right over and sits at his feet, a grown boy and his dog, as the pooch gets ready for a walk with Quaid’s girlfriend of two years, model Santa Auzina, 32.
Peaches even appears in his newest film, A Dog’s Journey (May 17). Quaid will reprise his role as Ethan Montgomery from 2017’s A Dog’s Purpose, about a pooch that discovers the meaning of life through a process of canine reincarnation. “The second one really ups the story,” he says. “It’s got doggie heaven in it!”
Quaid says he’s always been a dog person: “Dogs can feel you emotionally. They like you and accept you, even in
the worst of times.” Peaches snorts; Quaid rubs her head. “Peaches, you gonna make that noise all the time, sweetheart?”
MICKEY MANTLE WAS A GOD
Quaid grew up in Houston, where he was raised by his mother, a real estate agent, and his father, an electrician, with his older brother, actor Randy, now 68. He started playing in a peewee league at age 6, and his eyes light up when he talks about the memorable April day he watched his favorite player, Mickey Mantle, hit the very first home run in the Astrodome during the 1965 AstrosYankees exhibition game on TV.
Quaid and his brother got the acting bug from their father, who encouraged his boys to watch great actors, like William Holden in
The Bridge on the River Kwai, Marlon Brando and Laurel and Hardy. “My dad, he was a frustrated actor himself, and he was always doing bits around the house,” says Quaid. Randy began acting and was nominated for an Academy Award for The Last Detail when the youngest Quaid was still in high school. After attending the University of Houston as a drama student, Quaid moved to Los Angeles at age 20, “determined that it was gonna happen.”
And it did. His career eventually caught a spark, then blasted off with parts in Breaking Away, The Right Stuff, Great
Balls of Fire! and The Big Easy. He married—and divorced— actresses P.J. Soles (Carrie, Halloween) and Meg Ryan (Sleepless
in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, When Harry Met Sally...). He beat a cocaine habit that he’d been battling for years.
When he and Ryan divorced in 2001 after 10 years of marreturned riage, Quaid to one of his oldest loves: baseball.
In 2002, he starred in The Rookie, playing real-life high school science teacher and baseball coach Jim Morris, who tried out as a pitcher for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays at age 35, which led to a stint in the majors. Quaid practiced for nine months in his front yard to play Morris, who famously pitched at 98 miles per hour.
Quaid never put his own pitches on a radar gun. “I didn’t want to be disappointed!” he says. But during filming, he did pitch on a real pitcher’s mound. Once a week, “I got to go to Dodger Stadium and throw on the mound—the same mound that Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax and [Fernando] Valena zuela did. That was big thrill.” He rewatched The Rookie a year ago to show his girlfriend. “She’s from Latvia; she didn’t grow up with baseball.” But she loved it, he says, because the story “is not about baseball, really. It’s about second chances.”
It’s those second chances—and third and fourth—that he credits with his long-lasting success as an actor. “You gotta have a large capacity for rejection,” he says.
All told, Quaid’s played nearly 100 movie roles over four decades. “Maybe some, I should have stayed at home,” he says, laughing before taking it back. “Ah, I like all of ’em. I lived through every one that I did.”
He feels the same way about his life. “I feel happier in general.” Instead of trying so hard to be something or someone, “I’ll leave a lot of it up to God these days,” he says. “I just let go of a lot of things. I don’t worry about it now. I call it the wonderalive.” ful feeling of being
He spends his downtime with Auzina and his kids. Jack, 27, his son with Ryan, is following in his acting footsteps (with The Hunger Games and the upcoming Amazon series The Boys). Twins Thomas and Zoe, 11 (with his third wife, real estate agent KimBuffington—they berly separated in 2016 after 12 years of marriage and divorced in 2018), are involved in a lot of school and extracurricular activities.
He stays healthy by working out, playing golf and sometimes suiting up and cycling from Santa Monica to Palos Verdes and back, a round trip of about 60 miles. “You feel like you’re 12 years old
again when you’re on your bike, you know?” And he works on his music.