The Irish Times (04/Oct/2008) - Hollywood great who truly was one of the good guys
(c) Irish Times (04/Oct/2008)
- keywords: Academy Awards, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Paul Newman, Robert Altman
Hollywood great who truly was one of the good guys
The actor Paul Newman, who has died aged 83, became so famous for his dazzling looks that it is impossible to think of him as other than a celebrity.
Yet his many-faceted character renders the star image superficial. He was a producer-director, a racing driver, a political activist and a philanthropist who distributed more money - in relation to his own wealth - than any other American during the 20th century.
He directed six features, four of them starring his second wife, Joanne Woodward. One of these gained him an Oscar nomination - one of eight - although he waited until 1986 for the coveted best actor statuette. He received two other Academy Awards, an oddly premature lifetime achievement award in 1985 and the Jean Herscholt award for his philanthropic work in 1993.
In 1982 he founded Newman's Own, producing sauces and dressings based on his own recipes. He devoted the company's entire profits - around $250 million to date - to charitable causes.
He was actively concerned with some of the projects, including the Hole in the Wall Gang summer camps, devoted to ill youngsters.
That said, his fame inevitably rested on his screen career. The star of more than 50 features, including 11 opposite Woodward, Newman, with his blue eyes, insouciant smile and slim figure, was the idol of countless fans.
Newman was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, the younger son of a sports store owner. His father was of Jewish-German descent and his mother was a Catholic whose family came from Hungary.
His acting debut, aged seven, was as the court jester in Robin Hood at school. He left Shaker Heights high school in 1943 and went on briefly to Ohio University where he was expelled, supposedly after an incident involving a keg of beer and the rector's car.
From 1943 to 1946 Newman served as a US navy torpedo bomber radio operator. He graduated from the liberal arts Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, in 1949 and that year married Jacqueline Witte and returned to Cleveland to manage the family store.
Newman's father died the next year and he and his wife and son moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Newman attended Yale Drama School. After a lot of television work, he had a highly successful Broadway debut in William Inge's play Picnic (1953-54) - where he met Joanne Woodward.
Hollywood's call came via a calamitous screen debut. The Silver Chalice (1954) miscast him in a toga, and so dismayed him that years later he paid for advertisements urging viewers not to watch it on television.
Recovery from his disastrous movie debut came back on Broadway in 1955, playing a gangster in The Desperate Hours. Back in Hollywood he lost out to James Dean for the lead in East of Eden. But in 1956, following Dean's death, the role of the boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me fell to him. The couple of duds which followed could not take the shine off his success. By January 1958 Newman was divorced from Witte and had married Joanne Woodward.
In Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Newman played Brick opposite Elizabeth Taylor's Maggie. The homosexual theme was obscured and the reason for Brick's marital chaos never made clear. Newman, meanwhile, won an Oscar nomination.
In 1959 he returned to Broadway, and Tennessee Williams, in Sweet Bird of Youth. After that he abandoned theatre for 33 years, to the dismay of his wife, who believed that stage discipline would make him less reliant on his charm.
Sadly, over the course of his career Newman worked with few major directors on their best films. His work with Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, John Huston and Robert Altman was on their lesser movies. The great exception was Robert Rossen, whose classic adaptation of Walter Tevis's novel The Hustler (1961) gave Newman his most complex early role. As Fast Eddie, a poolroom shark, Newman crystallised his screen persona - a blend of vulnerability and bravado, criminality and redemption. Yet, the Academy passed him over for the second time. It was not until he played Eddie again in The Color of Money (1986) that he received the Oscar.
The Hustler initiated the period that brought Newman fame and fortune, in title roles that became part of cinema legend, among them Hud (1963), Harper (1966), Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Butch in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) with Robert Redford.
Newman looked understandably comfortable in the Indianapolis 500 drama Winning (1969), by which time his fee for any movie far exceeded the $500,000 he had paid years before to extricate himself from a studio contract.
By the 1970s Newman had become more overtly political. He was one of the narrators of the documentary King: A Filmed Record ... from Montgomery to Memphis (1970), about Martin Luther King. He campaigned against the war in Vietnam and was vigorous in his opposition to Richard Nixon, proud of being among the top 20 on Nixon's "most hated" list.
In the same decade, his box office credibility was maintained by two smash hits: The Sting (1973), which reunited him with Redford; and The Towering Inferno (1974).
However, Newman ended the decade with a disastrous flop, Robert Atlman's bizarre futuristic drama Quintet (1979).
In 1987, Newman directed The Glass Menagerie (1987), "to immortalise Joanne's performance". Other stints as director included the personal Harry Son (1984). The subject was almost too close to Newman, whose first child Scott died of a drug overdose in 1978.
When an intense performance in The Verdict (1982) failed to gain him an Oscar, it was suggested that his politics and residence on the east coast had alienated him from the Hollywood establishment. In compensation he was awarded, aged 60, an honorary Oscar for his lifetime achievement. The following year he chose not to attend the awards ceremony - only to win best actor for The Color of Money (1986).
After a long time out of acting he had a role in the Coen brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) and the lead in Nobody's Fool.
In 1995, aged 70, he took part in the 24-hour Daytona endurance race - becoming the oldest person ever to complete the event, capping his 1979 success when he and his co-driver finished second in the 24-hour Le Mans race.
In 2002 Sam Mendes's Road to Perdition brought yet another Oscar nomination. His final acting appearance was in the television drama Empire Falls. He won an outstanding actor Emmy.
In June 2007, he donated $10 million to Kenyon College from where he had graduated all those years before. The endowment was just one more act that earned him the justified reputation as one of Hollywood's good guys, as well as one of its greatest actors.
His wife Joanne and their three daughters and two daughters from his first marriage survive the deceased.
Paul Leonard Newman: born January 26th, 1925; died September 26th, 2008
