Francesco Quinn, 48, actor, dies

LOS ANGELES -- Francesco Quinn, the actor son of movie legend Anthony Quinn, had a promising debut with a supporting role in the Oscar-winning film "Platoon" before carving out a journeyman career with steady TV work and straight-to-video productions. He died Friday evening of a suspected heart attack at 48.

Quinn collapsed on the street on which he lived in Malibu while walking home from a nearby store with one of his sons, said Lt. James Royal of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's Malibu/Lost Hills station. He was pronounced dead at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center. Quinn's agent, Arlene Thornton, said in a statement that the cause had not been determined but that he was believed to have suffered a heart attack.

One of a reported 13 children of Anthony Quinn, the Academy Award-winning actor remembered for his title role in "Zorba the Greek," Francesco Daniele Quinn was born in Rome in 1963.

After playing the drug-dealing soldier Rhah in "Platoon," Oliver Stone's 1986 Vietnam War drama that won the Academy Award for best picture, Quinn appeared in more than a dozen films. In "The Tonto Woman," a Western based on an Elmore Leonard story that became a 2008 Academy Award nominee for best live-action short, he played a Mexican gunslinger.

On television, he had recurring roles in prime time series, including "JAG," "24" and "The Shield." He also played the young Santiago in a TV movie version of Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" that starred his father as the title character.