Randy Quaid

Randy Quaid is an American actor whose four-decade career has produced multiple defining American film and TV roles — particularly his 1973 Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination for Hal Ashby's The Last Detail. He was born Randy Randall Rudy Quaid on October 1, 1950, in Houston, Texas. His father William Rudy Quaid was an Italian-American electrical lineman, and his mother Juanita Bonniedale Jordan was a homemaker. His younger brother Dennis Quaid is also an American actor.

His education at the University of Houston (1968–1971; without earning a degree) launched his early-career path. His 1971 first feature-film appearance in Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (in which he played Lester Marlow, opposite Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, and Cybill Shepherd) launched his early-1970s American film public profile.

His 1973 supporting role as Larry Meadows in Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (opposite Jack Nicholson) earned him the 1974 Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination at age 23. His subsequent 1970s and 1980s American film career has produced multiple defining American films — particularly Bob Rafelson's The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), Jonathan Demme's Last Embrace (1979), Wes Craven's The Last Detail's 1984 sequel The Slugger's Wife (1985), and Jeremiah S. Chechik's National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989, in which he played Cousin Eddie — a recurring character he reprised across multiple subsequent National Lampoon's Vacation sequels).

His later biographical narrative across the 2010s and 2020s has been complicated by multiple American legal-and-deportation difficulties — particularly his 2010 California felony charge of vandalizing a Santa Barbara guest house, his subsequent 2010 Canadian asylum filing (claiming American "Star Whackers" assassination conspiracy threats against the Quaid family), and his 2015 Canadian asylum-application denial (which produced his subsequent 2016 American return and ongoing legal-resolution work). He has been with American actress Evi Quaid since 1989, and the couple has shared his later legal-and-deportation difficulties across multiple American TV-and-newspaper coverage.

His name Randy began as the English diminutive of Randall or Randolph (from the Old Germanic root meaning "shield-wolf"). Randy was a popular American boys' name through the mid-20th century.