The sad, strange saga of Independence Day hero Randy Quaid

Randy Quaid is a Golden Globe-winner and an Oscar and Bafta nominee who was discovered by Peter Bogdanovich. But perhaps the single most celebrated moments of his career involves him hurtling up the glowing urethra of an alien attack saucer poised over Area 51.

The scene appears in Roland Emmerich’s 1996 blockbuster Independence Day – and it was Quaid’s triumphant battle cry of “Hello boys, I’m ba-aack!”, with just the right yoo-hoo! inflection on the last word, that made a very silly action-movie moment immediately iconic.

In February this year, Quaid posted a video on Twitter in which he gave the beloved “I’m ba-aack” catchphrase another airing. The context was rather different, though: he said it while pretending to have rough sex with his wife Evi, who was wearing a bikini and a Rupert Murdoch mask, while an unseen dog barked in the background.

Throw in his supporting part alongside Brando and Nicholson in The Missouri Breaks, a memorable turn as Cousin Eddie in the National Lampoon Vacation comedies, and major character roles in everything from Days of Thunder to Brokeback Mountain, and it’s an unusual career arc to say the least. But Quaid is an unusual case.

Over the last few years this funny, talented actor has gone through one of the saddest, strangest declines Hollywood has ever seen. Aside from Will Smith, he’s the only major cast member of Independence Day not to appear in this summer’s belated sequel, Independence Day: Resurgence – and though yes, that’s partly because his character died in the first one, another favourite supporting player left for dead in that film makes a comeback.

If it had been at all feasible to have him burst through an airlock and roar that catchphrase again, you can bet 20th Century Fox would have had him do it.

Now 65 years old, with a bushy white mountain man’s beard, Quaid has spent most of his time since his last credited screen role in 2009 on the run from US law enforcement. The trouble began in September of that year, when Quaid and his wife were arrested in Texas: they’d left a hotel in California with an outstanding tab of around $10,000 on their room. (Further unpaid hotel bills have since come to light.)

A year later, they were arrested again, this time for squatting in the guest house of a home they’d owned some years ago. Various court dates for both arrests were set and missed, and well into six figures of bail money was forfeited. The first case was eventually dismissed against Randy for lack of evidence, while Evi was sentenced to 240 hours of community service. Four days after warrants were issued for their arrest over the second, the Quaids popped up in Canada, where they until last year, just out of the clutches of US law enforcement.

This is where things become complicated. The Quaids might have fled to Canada to avoid various criminal charges, but they also claimed to be on the run from what they called Hollywood Star Whackers, a shadowy cabal engineering the deaths and disgrace of Hollywood celebrities in order to somehow embezzle their royalties or life insurance.

“I’ve had eight friends of mine who have either died mysteriously or had scandals surrounding them in recent years,” Quaid said in a television interview in 2010, before explaining that the Star Whackers m.o. involves manipulating the banking and criminal justice systems from within, in order to creating “a scandal or a mystery around a celebrity that discredits them.”

According to the Quaids, Heath Ledger, David Carradine and Chris Penn were three such victims, and were convinced they, along with Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, were next on the list.

Quaid’s career certainly made sense for a while. In the 1970s, he worked with New Hollywood auteurs like Bogdanovich and Hal Ashby – whose film The Last Detail secured him Oscar, Golden Globe and Bafta nominations – until the success of the Vacation films in the 1980s gave him a profile as a comic character actor that led to higher profile work the following decade, including in Kingpin and (of course) Independence Day.

According to an in-depth Vanity Fair profile of the Quaids from 2011, the mayhem that ensued was largely down to Evi, a model and Los Angeles it girl Randy met in 1988 on the set of Bloodhounds of Broadway, and married the following year.

In what was surely the beginnings of the Star Whackers conspiracy, Evi persuaded her husband a small group of well-connected individuals were dipping into his royalty payments and the equity in their $1.35 million home. That, as opposed to the couple’s wild spending at hotels and Beverly Hills fashion boutiques, was what had landed them in dire financial straits.

This was exactly the point at which Quaid’s now relatively high profile as a character should have secured him a steady stream of worthwhile work. Instead, the late 1990s and early 2000s are a wasteland of bad choices: disposable TV films, yet more Vacation sequels, and roles in some of the most notable bombs of the late 20th century, including Pluto Nash and The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle.

Things looked momentarily rosier in 2007 when Quaid was cast in the Falstaff role in Lone Star Love, an American Civil War-set reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor.

But after assaulting a fellow cast member (in character, he said), plus a dizzying range of bad behaviour on Evi’s part (filming rehearsals in contravention of rules set down by the theatrical union Equity, sending unpleasant emails to producers, circulating around cast and crew a naked photo of herself holding a gun), Quaid was thrown out of the production, fined $81,000, and banned from Equity for life.

He made two more films, the comic thriller Real Time and the sports comedy Gary the Tennis Coach, before the first arrest warrant was issued in October 2009. Neither of those films were released in the UK.

Last October, the couple were arrested in Vermont while crossing the border after being ordered by Canada to return to the US. They were later released, and now appear to be touring Vermont, which is Evi's home state - although they remain wanted elsewhere in other parts of the US.

In an interview at the time of his arrest, Quaid said he hoped to eventually return to acting, either in film or television, although hope may be about as far as it gets. Flaming out in a blaze of eccentricity rarely works out as well as the movies make it seem.