Dennis Quaid's Favorite Roles — From 'Bill' to 'Far from Heaven' and More!

Dennis Quaid has had a lot of success onscreen, but his biggest victory happened offscreen when he overcame a 1980s drug addiction!

“I’m grateful to be alive every day,” he confessed.

Here are Quaid's ten favorite roles and what the 70-year-old actor said they mean to him.

"I just wanted a job back then — I was struggling. That movie made it a lot easier for me. I was 24 years old. All of a sudden, I didn’t have to audition so much anymore. I was getting offered things for the first time," he explained.

“I want to work with great people. Great people really make you better. It’s such a gift to realize at an early age what you want to do with your life and know what you want to do. It’s really a great gift," he said of collaborating with Mickey Rooney and Helen Hunt.

“The Right Stuff is my favorite movie that I’ve been in. I grew up in Houston, which was Space City at the time. So astronauts replaced cowboys in what I wanted to be. Gordon Cooper was my favorite. To get to play him was a boyhood dream come true," he said.

Quaid said he was “probably a little nutty” playing wild ’50s rocker Jerry Lee Lewis. “He was on the set every day telling me how to do everything. When you have Jerry Lee in the room, you’re going to have a little bit of fun and you are going to have a little bit of difficulty," the hunky star said.

Costar Meryl Streep is “a lot of fun. Between takes, we’d sing bad country Western songs and tell bad jokes. We made each other laugh so hard our makeup came off! Working with her is the easiest thing in the world," he shared.

Even though he “felt great” after dropping more than 40 pounds to play Doc Holliday, “I will admit that the day I hit 139 pounds, I looked in the mirror and got a little scared. I hadn’t weighed 139 since I was 14, and I looked like a skeleton," he said.

Playing Bill Clinton in the TV movie “was probably the scariest thing I’ve ever taken on. I almost turned it down. I knew Bill. I just couldn’t understand why they wanted to cast me. I always find that fear is the greatest motivator — it gets the juices going!" he noted.

Reminded of his first puppy Gertrude, he reflected, “Dogs give us what we’re all looking for. I still get choked up when I think of her … She was my everything. And I was hers."

The movie tells the remarkable true story about how Doug White (Quaid) landed a private plane after the pilot’s midair death. It’s full of Christian references and country music. “I never cared about having a Tom Cruise–type of career,” said Quaid. “I wanted to do the things that interested me. The older I get, the more I enjoy it because I’m not trying to get anywhere.”