HOLLYWOOD -- Dennis Quaid's days of being dubbed Mister Meg Ryan might be over.

The clean-and-sober Quaid seems to be on a roll these days after almost a decade of not-quites and near misses just as his wife's career shot her to fame and fortune.

The start of Quaid's recovery might be his dad part in The Parent Trap remake, which opens tomorrow.

In the Nancy Meyer update of the 1961 family classic, Quaid is the divorced dad, Natasha Richardson's the divorced mom, and Lindsay Lohan plays the Hayley Mills part as the separated twins.

Quaid's also getting early raves for his French-American mercenary role in Savior, which opens in the fall.

In three months, he starts shooting Oliver Stone's On Any Given Sunday. Quaid plays the role of an aging NFL star quarterback.

"Ho-hum," jokes Quaid at a Marina del Rey Hotel room. "One fantasy after another."

Life wasn't always so glib for the 44-year-old Houston native who made his late '70s debut in Breaking Away and received his big break-out a decade later in The Big Easy.

Too much success became too much for Quaid.

By 1990, his co-starring role in Postcards From The Edge was prophetic. Quaid says he realized, while shooting the picture, that he was an alcoholic and cocaine addict.

A year later he was off drugs and not drinking booze, and married to up-and-comer Meg Ryan. Son Jack followed, and so did Quaid's career slide.

On the other hand, he would never have done The Parent Trap if it weren't for his six-year-old son. "I wouldn't have understood it," admits Quaid, referring to the "breezy romantic comedy."

Now he does. He was a veteran character actor for his son's kindergarten class.

"Oh, you mean Zero The Hero," says Quaid chuckling. "I've done that several times. I dress up as a superhero for his math class. I talk about the importance of being zero."

Despite the mask, cape and hood, father Quaid's identity was almost exposed. "After the fourth time, Jack was telling me later that Zero has the same shoes I do."

Possibly more demanding might be Stone's look at the NFL through Quaid's veteran.

"My guy is sort of limping to his finish," says the actor. "Yeah, and I guess it will be controversial. No matter what you can say about Stone, you have to admit he's interesting."

Who else is in it?

"Cameron Diaz is the owner of the team," reports Quaid, realizing what he has just said.

"There. You have the controversy -- Cameron Diaz owning a football team."

Meanwhile, Quaid gets time off at their spread in Montana this summer before returning to their home in the hills of L.A. for the fall.

"We call it three months of summer and nine months of houseguests," he says of their two-home lifestyle.

Quaid also calls his new way of living the only way he wants it for himself, his wife and especially his son.

"I really feel I'm having a kids summer," Quaid insists. "It just seems great to be a kid.

"That's why we try to keep him away from the filmmaking process, and let him just be who he is. He has his world, and we have to respect that."

Maybe even celebrate it.

As FBI agent Frank LaCrosse in Switchback, Dennis Quaid had to play a man distraught over the abduction of his five-year-old son.

Being a father to a five-year-old himself, Quaid had no problem understanding or conveying the fear for the safety of a child.

"It's every parent's nightmare that something like that happens," says the twice-married Quaid, whose son Jack Henry is a product of his second marriage with actress Meg Ryan.

But he says the movie -- in which he tries to track down a serial killer who has abducted his son -- has not made him any more protective of the junior Quaid.

"I've always been very protective of my son because we're both high profile people ... It's also only a movie and there weren't any children actually put in jeopardy. It was just an idea -- a terrifying one."

Quaid says he was attracted to Switchback -- opening Oct. 31 in Calgary -- because of the script by Jebb

Stuart, who also directed the film.

"I read the script and I loved it," he gushes. "It really kept me on the edge of my seat. I'm also a fan of Jebb Stuart's (scriptwriting) from the Fugitive and Die Hard movies.

"It's funny -- no one knows who he is, yet everyone knows his movies."

Though Quaid admits stunt-heavy scenes like the one where he had to slide down a snowy embankment onto a moving train were physically demanding, he says it was actually the intense Colorado cold that was difficult to handle.

"It was beautiful, but so cold," recalls the 43-year-old Houston native. "I go skiing in it all the time, but you're moving all the time then and you can go inside whenever you want. Doing a movie in 20 below weather is different.

"I was only wearing a business suit (in most of the outdoor scenes.) But it didn't matter how many layers you had on, you still wound up checking your toes at the end of the night and counting them to see if they were still all there."

Quaid says he did not base his character on any particular person, but did meet with FBI profilers while researching his role.

"I found them very intuitive. I found they had a lot in common with actors because we do the same thing. They're really questioning the human faculty and digging under the surface to find out what people think.

"If you want to catch a murderer you have to think like a murderer."

Switchback is the latest addition to a 20-year career that -- with the exception of a few box-office successes like 1987's The Big Easy -- has not produced a certified blockbuster hit.

But Quaid isn't frustrated.

"Maybe it's somebody else's frustration, if you can call it that," he says.

"I'm still working. I'm doing what I really love to do.

"To tell you the truth, I don't think I would want the Tom Cruise bright-lights pressure. I mean, where's your privacy? Where's your life?

"I'm sure Tom's a happy guy and a nice guy, but for me, I wouldn't want that kind of life.

"I had a taste of that when I doing Jerry Lee Lewis (in Great Balls of Fire) in Memphis, when I couldn't walk down the street without 15 or 20 people doing cartwheels. It was too much."

Next on Quaid's agenda is a remake of the popular 1960's film The Parent Trap. He recently wrapped up filming his directorial debut, "a modern-day Western and family drama" called Everything That Rises, for TNT.

Quaid says the experience was one of the highlights of his career.

"It was terrifying. I was afraid the first day I got there that I wouldn't know where to put the camera and stuff like that. But everything worked out and I ended up really loving it."

BEVERLY HILLS -- In his 42 years, Dennis Quaid has slain his share of dragons.

He survived the divorce of his parents when he was 12. He emerged from the shadow of his older brother, Randy Quaid, who was a Hollywood success story when Dennis was a college junior.

He's been a Hollywood sex symbol, a Tinseltown bad boy, a has-been and a highly sought-after actor.

He waged his battles with alcohol and cocaine abuse and had a failed marriage to actress P.J. Soles.

"I hit rock bottom about 1984. I turned 30, got divorced and made some pretty bad career moves," admits Quaid.

Like the medieval dragon slayer in the sword-and-sorcerer epic Dragonheart, which opens Friday, Quaid emerged victorious.

In 1987, Quaid co-starred with Meg Ryan in Innerspace. Two years later, they became lovers. In 1990, they wed -- and two years later had a son, Jack.

"I've been clean and sober for six years now and just before we started filming Dragonheart two years ago, I gave up tobacco," says Quaid.

"I'm not pushing life to its limits any more but I'm living it to the fullest."

Quaid is no longer an A-list player in Hollywood. Dragonheart came to him only after Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson and Patrick Swayze had passed on it.

"I'm working and that's what's important. I never really wanted to be a celebrity. I wanted to be an actor and that's what I am now.

"Meg is the A-list actor in our family and she handles success a lot better than I ever did. What's important to us is that we're a family."

Both Quaid and Ryan come from broken homes.

He recalls he "spent the rest of my youth wishing my parents had stayed together. Fortunately, both my mom and dad were hands-on parents, so I was never starved for love.

"Meg and I are giving Jack the kind of home we wish we'd had."

That means spending as much time together as possible. While Quaid was filming Dragonheart in Slovakia, Ryan was filming French Kiss in Paris.

"Every weekend I got off, I'd fly to Paris to spend time with Meg and Jack.

"If I knew I was going to have a light week, I bring Jack back with me. We'd like to have a little girl very soon."

Quaid's co-star in Dragonheart is a computerized dragon that roars with the authoritative voice of Sean Connery.

Quaid insists he didn't mind his co-star was never on set the full five months of shooting in Slovakia.

"At least this co-star didn't talk back. There are a few of my previous co-stars I wish had been computerized." Like his Suspect co-star Cher?

"Cher is Cher and that's all you'll get from me," he says.

HOLLYWOOD -- It might have been a dark day when Dennis Quaid chose to impersonate a knight.

Who in his right mind would leave Meg Ryan and their four-year-old to go half way round the world for five months on horseback in 70 pounds of armor pretending to be with a 45-foot dragon that the computer guys were going to create later?

For Sean Connery it made sense to be in Dragonheart, opening Friday. He is Draco the dragon. And he alone of the cast didn't have to go to Slovakia to make Draco come to life. He only had to hang out in the Bahamas and speak its voice. He was finished before anyone else started.

But Julie Christie came out of virtual retirement to play a part without being dragooned. She, David Thewlis, Pete Postlethwaite, director Rob Cohen, the crew, everyone had to hang out in the real world imagining a creature that would upstage them if it worked and make them all look silly if it didn't.

And Quaid, the disillusioned knight, was to be its constant companion.

The all-American actor admits he was concerned. "Not only are you sharing the screen with a dragon, but the dragon talks like Sean Connery, for God's sake, the great voice of all time."

Much of Quaid's interacting was with tennis balls on widely spaced sticks (representing Draco's eyes). "Let me tell you, I've gotten less from a lot of actors I've worked with." He can joke now. But it was tough. Two months of sword lessons beforehand from a Japanese master. A hundred-plus days on horseback. "I felt like a centaur," he tells me. "It was like being in the army and in the circus at the same time.

"And there was one thing harder than working in Slovakia, and that was having a day off.

"I started meditating.

"I'd quit smoking right before I went there, and I started meditation to quiet my mind. Cause when you quit cigarettes, a lot of things come up in your head. It's a very hard drug to get off of." Especially in Slovakia. "Everyone in Eastern Europe smokes. I used the patch too."

What made the director think of Quaid as swashbuckling action hero?

"He asked me," says Cohen.

"He's never quite tagged that commercial validation, but he's slim and strong. He can be dramatic ... delightfully comedic ... sexy. He's been so many people that I thought, if we can just focus him, the real Dennis Quaid will be born in the public's mind.

"And when he asked to see me about this project because he loved the story, his humble request was very knight-of-the-old-code."

Quaid admits it: "I begged ... It's the kind of story I want my son to see ... The script read like it was actually written in the 10th century ... I asked for a meeting.

"I did it for The Right Stuff. I went in and basically begged. That's why we get the big bucks -- a lot of begging."

Dragonheart was also a chance to be somebody completely else. "That gets me off my lazy seat and scares me into really going for something. It's a rush ..."

Like being a rock star? (He was Jerry Lee Lewis in Great Balls Of Fire.)

"I really enjoy playing with other people, and being on stage with a band. It's an incredible feeling, such an immediate satisfaction ... But what I do is I'm an actor."

That seems to be a given. As is Meg Ryan, it also seems. "It just happened," he says. "You meet someone and that's it.

"I think fate had something to do with it too. On Innerspace we were just friends, but we did another movie together, D.O.A., about a year later, and that's where we fell in love ..."

Fate has also brought him into intimate contact with a good many of the other sex symbols of our time -- more than enough attractive opposites to really test a man's fidelity.

But not his, he says. Not now. "It's just doing movies. It doesn't have to be a huge struggle. Struggle gets very tiring after a while. I've been with other people in my life that I've worried about, and distrust is a real poison. But Meg and I are so close that no other relationship competes."

What about screen chemistry? What about The Big Easy?

"That was very real. The chemistry with Ellen (Barkin) was sort of like a sparring match, but you enjoy it. Or you don't mind being humiliated. (A chuckle, perhaps rueful.) For some reason we made each other laugh. You can't predict."

Yes, he plans to have more children. "As soon as Meg quits working," he says, deadpan. "We've actually got a plan, though Mother Nature's got to co-operate. We're going to the Caribbean next week ... and then have the summer off at home in Montana ..."

And any moment could bring a script that either of them has to do, for whatever reason.

"I believe we're all on a quest, but it's hard to know what that is, it's always easier to see the path looking back. I'm just trying to be more present."

I ask: Was there a time when he felt he made better decisions on cocaine?

"Not afterwards," he says easily. "I started using drugs when we all did back in the late '60s and early '70s. It was all about mind expansion, exploring yourself and the universe.

"It degenerated into just getting high.

"There's three phases of drugs -- fun, fun with problems, and just problems. Just problems are what it became for me. It was time to EJECT! EJECT! Trying to get to sleep with all those little birdies tweeting in your ears ..."

Recalling that may be why he treated the making of Dragonheart as a spiritual retreat, and came to believe that its story of redemption was his own.

The DENNIS QUAID File

JOBS: Waiter, Fuller Brush man, carpenter's apprentice, clown at AstroWorld in Houston ...

CAREER: Detective in The Big Easy, rock 'n' roll star in Great Balls Of Fire, country 'n' western warrior in Tough Enough, college prof in D.O.A., football hero in Everybody's All-American, gunslinger in Wyatt Earp, astronaut in The Right Stuff and in Enemy Mine and in Innerspace, feudal knight in Dragonheart, FBI agent in Going West (soon) ...

WIVES: Actresses P.J. Soles, Meg Ryan.

SCREEN SEDUCTIONS: Actresses Ellen Barkin, Cher, Jessica Lange, Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan, Winona Ryder, Meryl Streep, Kathleen Turner, Debra Winger ...

NEW YORK - Dennis Quaid, a reformed alcoholic, a former cocaine abuser and a retired hell-raiser, offers up a little advice for other brash young actors.

"I think a lot of actors hang onto the idea that `I have to suffer in order to be good!' It's really all a lot of hooey. They go out looking for suffering. Don't bother. There's enough suffering in the world to begin with. You just stick around, you're going to suffer."

Quaid has stuck around long enough to know. Holed up in a Manhattan hotel room, he flashes that good-ole-boy, Texas-bred, kick-ass grin he's famous for. We've seen it in a skein of films from Breaking Away to The Right Stuff, Great Balls Of Fire, Flesh And Bone, and last summer's Wyatt Earp, when he was Doc Holliday, the only bite in a toothless epic.

There's a whole lot of suffering going on in Quaid's new movie, a quirky, bittersweet comedy about infidelity called Something To Talk About. It opens Friday.

Our hapless hero plays Julia Roberts' philandering husband, a rascal who compulsively sleeps around until Roberts catches him with blonde in hand. Despite the comic aspects, there are some serious, desperate, real-life moments for both Roberts and Quaid to portray. He suffers.

Quaid, now clean and sober, now in his forties, now married to actress Meg Ryan, now the father of three-year-old Jack Henry Quaid, remembers his own suffering vividly. But it really didn't have anything to do with his career.

"I didn't do it to be an actor," he says of drinking - alcoholism runs in his family - and the cocaine use. Quaid has said he grew up in the drug culture of the '60s. "I did it because I just didn't like living in my head, basically."

Quaid survived. He looks around Hollywood and shakes his head: "There's a whole lot of sad cases. You feel grateful that you're able to get through that. Look at Dennis Hopper. He's the most amazing case of all to jump back."

But many don't make it, Quaid admits. "I feel lucky I did." The grin turns wistful.

"But I don't really regret any of those days, either. I had a good time in my youth. I had a good time doing all that. I don't need to do that anymore."

The people who flame out on booze or drugs just made more mistakes than he did, Quaid says. "That's ignorance. They don't see what's really going on. People drink, they use drugs, to avoid thinking about it. But the voice inside always comes back." It's the voice of reality, he says. A voice he didn't want to hear until he smartened up.

As a recovered lost soul, Quaid is still casual. He refuses to call himself enlightened. "But I realize now that everybody's real nature is just to be happy. It's a wonderful thing to be alive. Love is really where it's found. And I think you have to find that inside yourself."

Which is why the outside stuff - especially movie stardom - is not to be taken too seriously, Quaid says. For example, he is asked if Something To Talk About is important to him personally. He shrugs, he grins: "I can't really get too attached to it. I hope it does well. But it's not the be-all and end-all of life, is it?

"It's just a movie!"