Paul Newman

The irresistible star who made rogues lovable

Paul Newman

1925–2008

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“I can fairly safely say that I didn’t really know much about acting until I got to be in my 50s,” Paul Newman once remarked. Yet long before that, Newman was already one of Hollywood’s most beloved and iconic movie stars. Handsome but vulnerable, straightforward but complex, he deftly played everything from lovable rogues to bona fide antiheroes in more than 65 films spanning five decades. Newman’s natural sex appeal and easygoing manner made him the kind of actor men wanted to be like and women wanted to love.

Newman’s “early years were spent finding new ways to avoid living up to expectations,” said The Boston Globe. He said that his father, a sporting-goods merchant in Shaker Heights, Ohio, “always thought of me as pretty much a lightweight.” Newman “was kicked out of Ohio University when he dented a dean’s car with a beer keg.” Later, at Kenyon College—after serving in World War II—he graduated, as he put it, “magnum cum lager.” But at Kenyon he also discovered the stage, and after enrolling in the Actors Studio and appearing on Broadway in Picnic, performed often on live television. His screen debut, unfortunately, was in The Silver Chalice (1954), a gladiator epic so bad that Newman called it “the worst film of the ’50s.”

It was a rare misstep, said The Washington Post. Soon, Newman was receiving plaudits “for imbuing stock characters with an intelligent restraint.” He shone as Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) and as the sexually conflicted Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). “Newman hated to see his characters triumph on charm alone.’’ He didn’t want to be the kind of leading man who depended on his good looks, so he gravitated to such roles as the “soulless, self-centered” pool shark Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler (1961) and the amoral cattle rancher in Hud (1963). With his starring turn in the prison drama Cool Hand Luke (1967), in which he memorably ate 50 hard-boiled eggs, Newman became “the prime interpreter of selfish rebels.”

Newman also excelled at playing “unpredictable, caution-to-the-wind” types, said the Chicago Tribune. Two of his most appealing roles were opposite his friend Robert Redford—as the roguish, humorous outlaw leader in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and as the smooth-talking con artist Henry Gondorff in The Sting (1973). “His likableness is infectious,” said film critic Pauline Kael. At times, Newman attempted “to smash his likable image.” But despite doing his dissolute worst—as an alcoholic lawyer in The Verdict (1982), for instance—he “had a way of making even his most rakish characters appealing.”

The sinewy Newman was blessed with the classical looks of “a Roman statue and Windex-blue eyes,” said the Los Angeles Times. To keep in shape, “he did push-ups and ran up and down stairs until he was 80.” Still, his own children called him “Old Skinny Legs,” and offscreen he was decidedly nondescript, wearing jeans and running shoes and a beer-can opener as a necklace. His lack of affectation extended to his personal life. Married for 50 years to his second wife, Joanne Woodward, Newman shunned the Hollywood scene, preferring his 1739 farmhouse in Westport, Conn. “It is only when you’re away from California that you cannot take yourself seriously,” he said.

Newman was a decidedly man’s man, said the San Francisco Chronicle. “He loved drinking beer and playing elaborate pranks on friends. He once had a Porsche crumpled and festooned with ribbons and placed in one of Redford’s homes.” After playing an Indy 500 driver in 1969’s Winning, he became a high-speed racer, routinely tearing up the courses at Daytona and Le Mans. Outside of the racetrack he passionately pursued liberal politics, opposing the war in Vietnam, stumping for Eugene McCarthy as an official delegate to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and campaigning for George McGovern in 1972. Newman’s progressive causes earned him 19th place on President Richard Nixon’s famous enemies list—a distinction he called his “single highest honor.”

As he turned 50, Newman had box office successes with the disaster epic The Towering Inferno (1974) and the raunchy hockey comedy Slap Shot (1977), said Daily Variety. In Fort Apache, the Bronx and Absence of Malice (both 1981), he “moved comfortably into middle age without losing his onscreen energy and charisma.” But though he was repeatedly nominated for an Academy Award, and received an honorary Oscar in 1986, winning in his own right seemed to elude him. “Maybe if I stay away I’ll win,” he quipped. That’s precisely what happened a year later when Newman reprised his role as Eddie Felson in The Color of Money. “It’s like chasing a beautiful woman for 80 years,” he joked later. “She finally relents and you say, ‘I’m terribly sorry, I’m tired.’”

During his last 25 years, Newman played arguably the greatest role of his life—that of a philanthropist, said The New York Times. “In 1982, as a lark, he decided to sell a salad dressing he had created and bottled for friends.” That was the start of the Newman’s Own brand, a franchise that produced and sold lemonade, spaghetti sauce, popcorn, and other foodstuffs. He made more than $200 million in profits over the years, and donated it all to charity. Much of the money funded his Hole in the Wall Gang Camps—named for the Butch Cassidy outlaw band—which provide free recreation for critically ill children. “Newman was actively involved in the project, even choosing cowboy hats as gear so that children who had lost their hair because of chemotherapy could disguise their baldness.” For his efforts, in 1994 he received his third Oscar—the honorary Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

Last year, Newman announced his retirement from performing. “You start to lose your memory, you start to lose your confidence, you start to lose your invention,” he explained. “So it’s pretty much a closed book for me.” This spring, it emerged that the former chain smoker had lung cancer. When he died last week, he did so quietly on his Westport farm, surrounded by family and friends. “The trick of living,” he once said, “is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster.”