The new ‘girl’ in Quaid’s life

L.A. Correspondent

Ladies, despair. Dennis Quaid’s got a new girl. Her name is Fiona.

The two met on the set of his new movie, the romantic comedy Yours, Mine & Ours.

Opening on March 8, Yours, Mine & Ours is an adaptation of the 1968 hit film that starred Henry Fonda and comic legend Lucille Ball.

In this modern update, Quaid is Frank Beardsley, a navy captain and a widower who runs into his high school sweetheart, Helen North (Rene Russo), an artist and also a widow, during their 30th alumni homecoming. The chance meeting rekindles old feelings and they rush into marriage, forgetting to consider two key elements: Frank has eight uptight kids and Helen has 10 free-spirited kids of her own.

Russo returns to acting after a hiatus of three years. She has another movie which was released in 2005, Two For The Money with Al Pacino and Matthew McConaughey.

On the day she was supposed to meet with The Philippine STAR, Russo sent a note expressing her regrets. She was ill and had to back out from the press junket. Her note reads in part: "Unfortunately, I’m unable to join you this weekend. I loved making Yours, Mine & Ours. Dennis was the strong father figure, I was the carefree mom and our children…well, it was a blast working with 18 such talented, young actors."

Fortunately, the charming Quaid made it along with four talented newcomers: Sean Faris, Drake Bell, Danielle Panabaker and Katija Pevek. The four will be featured in another story.

"I didn’t have a problem with the older kids. But the younger ones are inexperienced and they don’t know they are at work. Getting them to focus sometimes is quite a challenge. We usually have stuff like: ‘When you say your line, you have to look at me, look right here (motioning to his eyes),’ I tell one kid. ‘But, I was.’ ‘No you weren’t!’" Quaid said.

The actor, still ruggedly handsome at 51, wore snug jeans and dark blue cashmere sweater to the interview held at the luxurious Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills in November last year.

He was in good spirits and was sharing funny anecdotes from the set.

Asked what he enjoyed most while making the movie, he replied: "Kissing Rene Russo every other day."

Russo was not the only girl he got to kiss on the set, too.

"Her name is Fiona. It was quite a day," he recalls. "Everybody remembers their first pig."

During one hilarious scene in the movie, the actor wakes up to someone gleefully licking his face all over.

"They put stuff in my mouth so the pig can lick it off. It was pretty foul. It smelled of curdled milk. And the thing is I had to come back for another day of pig-licking and everybody was saying ‘go for it’."

Pig-licking aside, the actor had a fantastic time on the set. To control the 18 kids from turning unruly, he and the director, Raja Gosnell, played out the good cop/bad cop set up, with him playing the good cop.

"I am wearing the uniform anyway on the set and I have a ‘good daddy’ voice and it always works for me," he explained.

And he is a "good daddy" in real-life, too.

Jack Henry, his son with ex-wife Meg Ryan, at 13 is now on the verge of young adulthood and Quaid beams with pride when talk veers towards his son.

"He’s very sophisticated for his age. They have film class at school and he loves making movies," he proudly shares.

"I think I am a fun dad. As long as you do your work and you treat people well and when things go off track I step in but I am not gonna be there telling them beforehand. In some ways they need to make their own mistakes to find out."

"As a parent, my philosophy is really teaching him how to be responsible for themselves. When he’s not responsible, that’s when I step in. I know a lot about being a kid. It reminds me so much of my life when I was his age," he continues.

"Everybody had a tough puberty," he discloses. "Probably the hardest time in life is between 12 and 19. It’s really a tough time because you are so uncomfortable with your body and got all these new feelings and you don’t know how to do anything. I was never a sports guy. I was kind of small and I only bloomed when I started making movies."

Bloom, indeed, he did.

In a career spanning for about 30 years now, he has made over 50 movies and has received commercial and critical acclaim for roles in Far from Heaven, Wyatt Earp, Great Balls Of Fire, The Day After Tomorrow, among other hits.

"I have a really good time in my career right now. What’s happening to me is what usually happens to actors in their thirties – getting roles that are really good, so what’s happening is a real renaissance. I think I like to head towards directing. Clint Eastwood is my kind of guy now, as to how I want my career to head."

"I really don’t have a grand strategy of roles that I play except that I like variety. That’s what’s keeping it interesting to me," he says. "Actors want to be typecast themselves, too. They want to find something that works and basically doing the same thing over and over again, like working in the same genre."

"And comedies are fun. I like the fact that this movie is a romantic comedy with kids. It has something for everybody."

On having his own star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Quaid jests: "I don’t know, I guess it’s kind of cool. The second night I was here in LA when I just moved out of here and I went down on Hollywood Boulevard and went to see the stars to check out the names and I was ‘who the heck is that?’ "

Today, nobody would probably be asking who the heck Dennis Quaid is.

Perhaps Fiona?

Yours, Mine & Ours is distributed by Columbia Pictures.