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Paul Newman was one of the most enduring stars of American cinema, an actor whose blue eyes became famous around the world and whose career lasted more than fifty years. He was born on 26 January 1925 in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and grew up in a family that ran a sporting goods store. As a young man he served in the United States Navy during the Second World War, then studied at Kenyon College and later at the Yale School of Drama. He also trained at the Actors Studio in New York, where the new, naturalistic style of acting was reshaping American theatre and film.
Newman first made his name on stage. His Broadway success in William Inge’s play Picnic in 1953 led to Hollywood, although his film debut, The Silver Chalice (1954), was a disappointment that he later treated with good humour. He recovered quickly. In Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) he played boxer Rocky Graziano with a physical energy that announced a serious screen actor, and in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), opposite Elizabeth Taylor, he played Brick Pollitt, a former football star drowning in drink and guilt. That performance made him a major star, and it also established the pattern of much of his best work: men who look confident on the surface but are wrestling with failure, conscience, or a past they cannot undo.
The star of the 1960s
Through the 1960s Newman built a run of films that still define his reputation. In The Hustler (1961) he was Fast Eddie Felson, a pool player whose talent was matched only by his self-destructiveness. In Hud (1963) he played a charming, selfish Texas rancher, a performance that showed he was willing to be unlikeable. In Cool Hand Luke (1967) he was a prisoner who refuses to be broken, and in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) he found his most famous screen partnership, with Robert Redford, in a western that mixed comedy, friendship, and a famously bleak ending.
What made Newman different from many stars of his generation was his lightness. He could be funny without losing gravity, and he could play a rogue without asking the audience to forgive him. His characters often bent the rules, but Newman never played them as simple heroes. He liked flawed men, and he gave them dignity by taking their doubts seriously. Directors trusted him because he arrived prepared, worked without fuss, and understood that a close-up could do more than a speech.
The 1970s and 1980s: a second peak
Many actors who became stars in the 1950s faded in the 1970s. Newman did the opposite. He won some of his greatest popular successes in that decade, including The Sting (1973), a witty con-artist caper that reunited him with Redford and director George Roy Hill, and The Towering Inferno (1974), in which he played the architect of a burning skyscraper. He also took risks, playing a rough minor-league hockey coach in Slap Shot (1977) and a self-invented frontier judge in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972).
In the 1980s his work grew darker and more reflective. In Absence of Malice (1981) he played a man whose life is damaged by a careless newspaper story, and in The Verdict (1982) he gave one of the finest performances of his career as Frank Galvin, an alcoholic lawyer given one last chance to do the right thing. In The Color of Money (1986) he returned to Fast Eddie Felson, now older, wearier, and wiser, and finally won the Academy Award for Best Actor. It was a fitting reward: the role closed a circle that had begun twenty-five years earlier.
A style of his own
Newman’s acting style is worth pausing over, because it is easy to mistake for effortlessness. He did not rely on grand gestures or showy transformations. Instead he listened, he reacted, and he let a small change in expression do the work of a paragraph of dialogue. Watch him in a two-person scene and you will see how often he gives the other actor the best moment, then steals the scene back with a single look. That generosity was part of his appeal to directors and co-stars alike, and it explains why so many of his partnerships — with Elizabeth Taylor, with Robert Redford, with Joanne Woodward — feel like genuine relationships rather than star pairings. He was also unusually willing to look older, tireder, and less handsome as the years passed, which is why his later performances carry such weight. Where other stars fought age, Newman used it, and his characters in the 1970s and 1980s are richer because they carry the marks of the lives they have lived.
Beyond the screen
Newman’s life away from acting was almost as remarkable as his film career. He was married to actress Joanne Woodward from 1958 until his death, a partnership that became one of Hollywood’s most admired marriages. He was a passionate racing driver, competing seriously well into his seventies, and he was a generous philanthropist. In 1982 he founded Newman’s Own, a food company whose profits went to charity, and he later founded the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp for seriously ill children. He rarely made a fuss about this work, and he often joked that the salad dressing had made him more famous than his films.
Paul Newman died on 26 September 2008 at his home in Westport, Connecticut, at the age of eighty-three. He left behind more than sixty films, but also a reputation for decency, humour, and professionalism that is rare in any profession. For Past Tunes, he belongs with the great screen actors of the 1970s and 1980s not only because he was still making important films in those decades, but because those films show an actor growing older in public with honesty and grace. His characters from that period — con men, lawyers, coaches, and hustlers — are men trying to live with their mistakes, and Newman played them as if he understood every one of them.