Living a hard life prepared actor Dennis Quaid to experience the life that God has for him today.
“It has gotten me through hard times,” he says. “It has gotten me through good times, too. Good times and gratitude. I lean on God when it comes to the hard times as well. You know, we all need that. It’s something that gives me a lot of joy.”
Quaid attended Sunday School as a child but later drifted away from his faith until he was able to recover from a cocaine habit. Getting over it, he says, was a breakthrough that saved his life.
From the cover of “Fallen.”
Quaid says in his youth he identified as a Christian but moved away from that faith. “I turned to Buddhism, and I read the Dhammapada and then I read the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita and I read the Bible four times, cover to cover,” he told Variety in 2023.
He says he found what he didn’t like, what he called “churchianity.”
“I read the Bible again, cover to cover, and was really struck by the words of Jesus, and that’s where my personal relationship with Jesus started,” he told Fox News. “That’s grown over the years. So I wrote ‘On My Way to Heaven’ which is the song that I wrote for my mother back in 1990. When I got out of cocaine school, as I call it.”
Quaid released his debut gospel record, “Fallen,” with the encouragement of The Gaither Vocal Band, last July. It was inspired by his own life and followed his work in faith-based movies like “Soul Surfer and “I Can Only Imagine.” He doesn’t like the religious labeling of the films, saying they limit who sees them. He prefers the term “aspiration” rather than faith-based” and believes they’re gaining a wide audience.
“The formula for success for these films is simple: It’s either a good movie or it’s not. In the past, what were called ‘faith-based films’ were generally very low-budget and most of them were not very good productions,” he has stated in the past.
The subtitle for “Fallen,” is “a gospel record for sinners.”
“It’s autobiographical,” he said. “It turns out to be a part of the story. My spiritual journey. When you get down to it, it’s everything. It’s a God-sized hole. I think it’s inside all of us that we fill with other things. It’s really important to me. It makes life worthwhile. It explains a lot of things that we don’t have words for.”
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His time in Nashville has also been therapeutic and he believes friends with similar values are more easily found there. He told Variety that Hollywood can be lonely, especially today.
Quaid with Elaine Hendrix in 1998’s “The Parent Trap”. Image Buena Vista Pictures.
“Maybe it’s because I’m older,” Quaid surmises, “But there doesn’t seem to be the sense of community in Hollywood that I felt in the ‘70s, even into the ‘80s. It’s always been about people in their cars, but today it’s even more so. People stay in their trailers, they’re on their phones. There’s not the same kind of communication there once was. L.A. has been very good to me, and I have great friends. But it is hard to make friends. There is a lot of self-involvement. In Nashville, you know your neighbors.”
Faith is the foundation of his marriage to his fourth wife, Laura Savoie. Quaid, 69, met Savoie, 30, in 2019 at a business event. At the time she was working toward her second Master’s degree at the Texas McCombs School of Business. A year after meeting, the two got married, and a year later, they paired her business expertise with his film experience to form a production company called Bonniedale Films.
“God is in my wife and my relationship, and it’s another thing that I never really had before,” he said. “She and I have such a beautiful relationship, and we pray together”.
He says faith doesn’t usually open doors for someone in Hollywood. “A lot of people are embarrassed to talk about their faith. They think it’s some kind of Boy Scout thing, where you’ve got to follow the rules. But I talk to God a lot, every day. I question everything I do. I believe it’s about keeping trying. It’s about self-examination and throwing your ego out the door,” he shared with Variety.
Quaid new recording is titled “Fallen: A Gospel Record for Sinners.”
–Dwight Widaman | Metro Voice
