established actor waiting his turn in the hall, and Quinton lost hope – although as a backup, he’d handed the director his business card, offering to work security.
His mom never doubted his acting success. But she wouldn’t live to see it.
Years before, Laura had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure, a condition where the heart is not pumping properly. She developed obstructive sleep apnea, characterized by snoring and disrupted sleep, and had trouble breathing. She was given medications, but her health continued to decline. Laura died in September 2008, at the age of 44.
It was before he’d officially landed the role. “One of the last things she told me about it was that it doesn’t matter whatever is going on right now – there’s no way they’re going to do that movie without me.”
She was right. But her loss devastated him.
Quinton, his brother, Jarred, and their mom had been “like the Three Musketeers growing up,” he says. He never knew his father, and his mother’s death meant the loss of “my best friend, and the only parent I had.”
“She was everything” to him, Monique shares. “He had a wonderful grandmother. He had amazing aunts. He had cool cousins. But she was everything.”
Quinton set his grief aside, because he had work to do. He began working on “The Blind Side” in April 2009, and it was released that November. Its tremendous success let Quinton mask his pain in his work.
His blossoming acting career filled his days. He likened it to a noise that drowned out other thoughts. But when work tapered off, “all of that noise got quiet,” he says. “And then the fact that my mom is not here anymore got loud again.”
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Forging his own healthy path
Overwhelmed by grief, Quinton fell into depression and depressive eating. “I would eat all the time, even when I wasn’t hungry,” he shares. “And none of it was healthy.”
While filming “The Blind Side,” he weighed 370 pounds. By 2019, he’d hit 565. That May, he felt sick, “like a bad chest cold.” He lost his