The Parent Trap , The Day After Tomorrow , A Dog’s Purpose , The Rookie , and The Intruder star, Hollywood icon, Dennis Quaid , is a very interesting and surprisingly complex fellow!
There is a lot more to him than just being an incredible actor. He is a man who wears many hats, to say the least.
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Here are a few interesting facts that fans didn’t know about him!
1. Ironically, he got engaged to a 26-year-old woman, Laura Savoie, in 2019 AND he has twins from his previous marriage.
AKA, the plot of his film , The Parent Trap , is basically his real life.
2. He asked Laura to marry him while she was taking a selfie.
“It happened on the very northernmost point of Oahu, at Turtle Bay. It was kind of spontaneous. It was very much a surprise,” he told Extra .
“I had the ring in my pocket… It has been kind of a month-and-a-half plan… I wanted it to be private,” he went on.
“She was actually taking a selfie of us, and I put the ring in front and said, ‘Will you marry me?’ — and then she fell down .”
3. He became an advocate for patient safety after his twin babies nearly died due to human error at the hospital they were born at.
The babies were accidentally given a massive overdose of the blood-thinning drug, Heparin. Thankfully, they were able to return to a stable condition.
But doctors were concerned about the “long-term effects” this mistake might have caused .
4. Amid the pandemic, he launched his own podcast called, *The Dennissance*.
(I don’t think he could have come up with a better title for his podcast, tbh).
His first interview was with Billy Ray Cyrus!
“I’m starting out with people that I know,” Dennis told Wtop News . “There’s such a depth to him that people don’t know and such a deep spiritual life. … He’s a great family man. It’s really about second chances in his life, which I think is a very interesting story, and he’s had a number of them and he’s engineered them himself and made his own luck in a way.”
5. He landed his first acting gig one year after moving to Los Angeles in the 1979 film, *Breaking Away*.
“It really does hold up,” he told Wtop News of the movie.
“My fiancee Laura had never seen it before, so we watched it a couple of months ago and I was really surprised and really heartened because the story really does hold up. It’s a coming of age story. It’s an underdog movie. There were a lot of youth movies of the ’80s and I think it was pretty much the first one.”
6. He is a big country music fan.
“I grew up in Houston listening to all sorts of country music from Elvis and the Beatles, to Gene Autry — who I’m related to — to people like Hank. But I really love the outlaws like Willie, Waylon and people like Merle, and the Bakersfield sound always moves the needle for me,” he told CMT .
“I always loved Johnny Cash songs like ‘A Boy Named Sue,’ ‘Ring of Fire’, and ‘I Walk the Line.'”
“These were story songs. That’s why it’s really cool to be part of a new narrative around the outlaws like this Uncle Drank thing — he’s an outlaw, too,” he added .
7. He used to play in a Christian band.
“Christian music is a big part of my life. And so is faith. My song ‘On My Way to Heaven’ was written for my mother,” he told CMT .
“That’s a very big song that I’m going to be doing something with later in the year, and I can’t wait for the world to hear it.”
“My podcast *The Dennissance* deals a lot with faith, redemption and spirituality,” he continued.
“I’m hoping to do a whole other faith-based podcast with our partners very soon. Stay tuned on that. This will be a whole new side of me that many of my fans may not be aware of.”
8. He was once named “The Best Celebrity Golfer in Hollywood.”
“That’s complete BS. I can’t tell you how much [expletive] I’ve taken from my friends over that. I would love to bury it right now. Maybe I was the best-known celebrity golfer in Hollywood, but Jack Wagner is the best golfer. I’ve played with him — he’s a scratch, or a plus two or three,” he told Golf Magazine .
9. Before becoming an actor and a musician, he dabbled in comedy.
As a teenager, he performed stand-up comedy at nightclubs in Houston, Texas — specializing in impressions .
His talent for impressions led him to try acting instead. Obviously, it worked out.
10. He is a pilot.
Among Harrison Ford, and surprisingly, many other celebs, Dennis Quaid can fly a plane! In preparation for his film, The Right Stuff , he decided to take up flying.
“I felt like I should learn to fly, because that’s what these guys did,” he told Airport Journals .
“It helps you get into the role. Right after getting it, I found out Gordo Cooper lived a couple of miles from me in LA. I went over and talked to him, and he turned me on to Clay Lacy.”
He admitted , however, that initially, he was afraid to fly.
“I really didn’t understand aerodynamics,” he said. “Also, I had an ex-brother-in-law who took me up in a little plane, cut the engine and put it into a spin.”
11. He battled anorexia and addiction.
“I was doing about two grams a day,” he told People .
“I was lucky. I had one of those white-light experiences where I saw myself being dead and losing everything I had worked for my whole life.”
