Dennis Quaid remembers the shameful symbols of segregated life in America.

"I, myself, grew up in Houston, Texas, in the late '50s and early '60s, and I remember separate restrooms and drinking fountains," he said this week from a Philadelphia publicity stop for "The Express." The movie, about the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy, opens in theaters today.

Younger viewers have found its portrait of racism shocking, but Quaid says the production tried to approach that honestly and without political correctness. "It's a look back at the way we were, and it speaks to how far we've come today."

"The Express" stars Rob Brown as the late Ernie Davis, the historic Heisman winner and one of the greatest running backs in the history of college football. Quaid is Ben Schwartzwalder, his coach at Syracuse University who died in 1993 at age 83 after a heart attack.

Schwartzwalder turned out a long line of outstanding running backs that included Jim Brown, Jim Nance, Floyd Little and Larry Csonka.

The 54-year-old Quaid, who doesn't get to flash his famous smile much as the gruff coach, had two invaluable resources for his role. One was the coach's 96-year-old widow, Ruth (known as Reggie), and the other was Jim Brown, who worked with Quaid on another gridiron drama, "Any Given Sunday."

They drew a portrait of a decorated World War II paratrooper who sometimes wore his combat boots to practice and brought his military grit to coaching, accounting for his old-school, rough-and-tough style.

Obsessed with football and sometimes abrasive, he was a man of his times. "He was a groundbreaker in that he was one of the first coaches to actively recruit African Americans to a team," Quaid said, "but the civil rights movement was just bubbling up and he didn't really want that coming on to his field, and that was his world."

When he died, the Syracuse Post-Standard noted that Schwartzwalder endured complaints in 1970 of unfair treatment from black players. Yet, in his earliest years, he made Bernie Custis one of the first black Division I quarterbacks in the nation.

"Ernie wound up touching Ben's soft, creamy center in a way," Quaid says. Davis had a "quiet grace" about him and his bond with the coach was different than Brown's. "Their relationship became almost father and son, really."

Quaid knew the name Ernie Davis but he wasn't aware of his story and says many sports-savvy people aren't familiar with the athlete or have forgotten about him.

"It's definitely a story that needed to be told, I could tell that the first time I read the script. It's a story that's more than about football. Ernie Davis transcended football, he transcended race and color in his short life. Had he lived, I think he would have been one of the icons of the civil rights movement."

The movie, in the end, is about living your life gracefully and using your life to its full effect, the actor said. That may be why it touched Quaid's wife, Kim, mother of their 11-month-old twins who are "perfectly healthy and happy" but nearly died after being given the wrong dose of a blood thinner.

"I really want to make the film for people like my wife, who really doesn't like football, doesn't watch football, but this is one of her favorite movies of mine just because of the emotional aspect of it."

Like most movies, it takes some dramatic license, but Quaid says, "What we told are things that actually happened," although a detail here or there may be off. "Sometimes if you try to get all the facts right, you miss the truth of a person. That's really what we were after."

Syracuse rolled out the orange carpet for the Sept. 12 world premiere of the movie, which Quaid and his "date," Reggie Schwartzwalder, attended with thousands of others. "Syracuse was a little different, in that the whole town turned out, which was really quite something, and they were applauding the scenery, in fact."

Most of the movie was filmed in Chicago but some exteriors were shot in Syracuse or re-created, in the case of Archbold Stadium, since replaced by the Carrier Dome.

Two years ago, Quaid spent the fall in Pittsburgh making "Smart People," a gig that allowed him to play golf at Oakmont Country Club. The temperature was 40 degrees and he didn't do all that well, but he says, "That was really quite something ... what an incredible course."

"Smart People" is now on DVD, and Quaid has a string of movies coming out, including a horror film called "Pandorum," a crime thriller with Ziyi Zhang titled "The Horsemen" and "G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra," in which he plays a general who is the head of an elite military unit.

"I'm having more fun now than I did in my 20s because I'm just doing it because I love doing it, really, and I'm not trying to prove anything to myself or to anybody else. I'm lucky to be doing what I do; I'm just grateful to still be here."