The Late Great - Paul Newman - Cool Hand
Piers Chandler looks back at the life of Paul Newman, the last great Hollywood superstar
The death of Paul Newman last year also marked the end of a golden age of Hollywood superstars. Newman was part of the generation of young actors ? such as Marlon Brando and James Dean? - who studied at the Actor?s Studio in New York and introduced Method Acting to cinematic audiences worldwide. But although in his early days he was typcast for his handsome leading man looks, Newman developed throughout his carrer as both a fine character actor and director. He acted in more than 65 movies over more than 50 years, drawing on a physical grace, unassuming intelligence and good humour that made it all seem effortless.
A? modest man despite his star status ??I had the privilege of doing the worst motion picture filmed during the Fifties,? he recalled of his 1955 screen debut in The Silver Chalice ? Newman was quick to agree with his critics that he was often typecast. And he springs to mind most readily through such stylishly light movies as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting? both with Robert Redford ? which nevertheless remain enduring classics.?
But he was an actor of much more variety and range than those films suggest. A New York Actors? Studio-trained player, he apppeared on the Broadway stage and won acclaim there. And he carried this ability to create truth to character to the 1958 screen version of Tennessee Williams?s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
His performance in the pool table drama The Hustler, in which his would-be tough but youthful rookie is brilliantly cast against the icy assurance of the mature George C. Scott marked his appearance as a bone fide star.
His role as indomitable convict in a Southern country jail in Cool Hand Luke? was perhaps his best. In a penal establishment where he has been committed for trivial crimes, the convict Luke sustains the spirits of those who serve unending terms in a prison whose regime is one of unrelieved brutality.
Newman came on the scene after the demise of the studio system that had created and supported the star system, and he was one of the few screen actors to emerge as unmistakable superstars in the grand Hollywood style. But he was also able to shape his own career. An actor who happily graduated to mature roles as he grew older, he was also a successful producer and a gifted director, able in this to build on the talents of his second wife, the actress Joanne Woodward, whom he directed in a number of films.
Paul Newman was born in 1925 in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. After graduation he began his university career at Kenyon College in Ohio, but enlisted in the Navy in 1943 and did not complete his degree, in economics, until after the Second World War.
He had hoped to be a pilot but tests proved that he was colour blind and he trained as a radioman and gunner. He served in torpedo squadrons in the Pacific and took part in the battle for Okinawa.
While at university he got bitten by the acting bug, and immediately upon graduation he went? into repertory theatre. From here he went into daytime television, and by 1953 into his first Broadway production, where he was noticed and offered a Hollywood contract.
He had meanwhile married Jackie Witte and had three children, and had in his spare time enrolled as a student at the Actors? Studio, then in its most famous phase as the home of the Method school. But while on Broadway he had met another understudy, Joanne Woodward, and
after his divorce they married in 1958. This second marriage was to prove extremely important to him, professionally as well as personally. Although Newman?s and Woodward?s careers took off separately, they managed to play opposite each other in a succession of films, while Newman directed her in some of her best independent roles.
Newman?s first film role was the lead in a disastrous Roman epic called The Silver Chalice? which nearly ended his film career at a stroke. Fortunately he was almost immediately cast in the leading role of The Desperate Hours on Broadway, renewed his studies at the Actors? Studio, and when his next approach from Hollywood came it was far more suited to his talents. This was to play the tough street tearaway turned world middleweight boxing champion Rocky Graziano in Robert Wise?s 1956 biographical film Somebody Up There Likes Me.
It at once established his star image, tough yet sensitive, and established him as one of the cinema?s finest physical actors, superb at conveying the reality of, in this case, a prizefighter?s life. From this time on he was continuously in work, either filming in Hollywood or, especially in early days, appearing in a number of prestigious television dramas. In the cinema he was a startlingly original Billy the Kid in The Left Handed Gun (1956). In that same busy year he was in The Long Hot Summer, a Faulkner subject in which he co-starred for the first time with Joanne Woodward and Tennessee Williams?s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Elizabeth Taylor, which brought his first Oscar nomination.
In 1961 he played one of the key roles in his career, Fast Eddie Felson, the rebel pool-player hero of Rob The Hustler. The character had all the characteristics of Newman?s star persona ? the irreverence, the obtrusive cool, the sheer gall that made him an idol for a disaffected younger generation, but also embodying its vulnerability.
Two years later in Hud, he played the ne?er-do-well son of the new cattle country baron who gets his way with his family mainly on his insolent charm, and wins the sympathy of audiences even while kicking everyone else in the teeth. He also she had another success, as the eponymous sub-Chandler private eye in Harper.
Then came Cool Hand Luke and the decade ended in fine style with one of the most commercially and critically successful of all his films, George Roy Hill?s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , which created a great new double act with Robert Redford.
The 1970s brought a change of image for Newman, taking him away from his insolent rebel roles and ? at his own choice ? more in the direction of character acting. Two of his most interesting films at this time, both directed by John Huston, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean and The Mackintosh Man? failed to achieve the popularity they deserved. But a new teaming with Robert Redford as Chicago conmen in The Sting brought them both a big hit, with the likeable exuberance of its two irrepressible protagonists.
After The Sting and his next film, The Towering Inferno , a superior disaster movie which saw nearly a dozen stars variously involved in a flaming skyscraper (and being killed off in reverse billing order), Newman was at the peak of his career. As he progressed through his fifties, he continued to develop as a character player.
While he continued to make relatively uncomplicated star vehicles such as The Drowning Pool and Slap Shot, where he played such traditional iconic roles as a detective or a sportsman, he also began to work with such emergent talents as Robert Altman, in Buffalo Bill and the Indians and Quintet, and the Merchant/Ivory team, in Mr and Mrs Bridge. But among the best of his later performances was the alcoholic lawyer in Sidney Lumet?s The Verdict. As time went on he had the good sense to work with, and sometimes play second fiddle to, the new generation of stars.? In Martin Scorsese?s The Color of Money supporting Tom Cruise, he reprised his character Fast Eddie Felson from The Hustler and after several near misses he finally won an Oscar.? In Sam Mendes?s gangster drama, Road to Perdition , he played a Chicago gang boss to Tom Hanks?s hitman and was Oscar nominated yet again.
He was then 77 and it was his final film role. Few Hollywood superstars coped with advancing years so gracefully, and perhaps none managed to remain, according to his female fans at least, so irresistibly sexy.
Away from screen and stage Newman launched a range of food products, Newman?s Own, including salad dressing, pasta sauce and popcorn, donating all the profits to charity. Newman once told a reporter. ?The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I?m not running for sainthood.
I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.?He was also a motorsport enthusiast who successfully competed in races until he was well past 70. A liberal in politics, he was a prominent supporter of the Democratic Party, and in 1978 was appointed by President Jimmy Carter as a US delegate to the UN Conference on Nuclear Disarmament.
If Marlon Brando and James Dean defined the defiant American male as a sullen rebel, Paul Newman recreated him as a likable renegade, a strikingly handsome figure of animal high spirits and blue-eyed candour whose magnetism was almost impossible to resist, whether the character was Hud, Cool Hand Luke or Butch Cassidy.
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Quotes:
?The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I?m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out?
Newman acted in more than 65 movies over more than 50 years, drawing on a physical grace, unassuming intelligence and good humour that made it all seem effortless.
Few Hollywood superstars coped with advancing years so gracefully, and perhaps none managed to remain, according to his female fans at least, so irresistibly sexy.
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