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Who is Paul Newman?
The embarrassing thing is that the salad dressing is out-grossing my films.
Almost none of the film stars whose mixed fortune it is to become sex symbols in the eyes of the moviegoing public are allowed to age gracefully, but American actor Paul Newman has managed to maintain his matinee-idol status for over 40 years. His famous baby blues were as striking at 70, when he collected his eighth Best Actor Oscar nomination, for 1994's Nobody's Fool, as they had been at 30, when he made his feature-film debut in 1954's The Silver Chalice. The folksy actor never took a liking to the Hollywood lifestyle favored by many of his peers, and managed to project an all-American wholesomeness away from the silver screen, even during the years when just the sight of his name in the opening credits drew lustful sighs from female audience members. In the twilight of his storied career, he became an ardent philanthropist; by the time the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored him with its Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1994, Newman had raised over $80 million in support of various charities.
An avowed lifelong beer lover, Newman was born in the brew-drenched burg of Cleveland, Ohio, the second and youngest child of parents with mixed German and Hungarian bloodlines. His father was a partner in a successful sporting goods store, and thus Newman was raised in Cleveland's swanky Shaker Heights suburb. Though not overly inclined toward acting as a child, he nevertheless tackled roles in both elementary and high school plays and even bagged the title role in a Cleveland Play House production of St. George and the Dragon. After graduating from Shaker Heights High, Newman enlisted in the navy, with his sights set on the pilot-training program. While waiting to be put on active duty, he enrolled at Ohio University, where he was reputedly involved in a number of frat-boy shenanigans; by one account, school officials asked him to withdraw after he dented the university president's car with a beer keg. Called up in the summer of 1943, the would-be aviator was booted from pilot training when navy doctors confirmed that he was color-blind; he wound up filling his three-year tour aboard torpedo bombers in the South Pacific, serving as a third-class radio operator.
Discharged in 1946, Newman enrolled at Ohio's Kenyon College, where he majored in English and started for the football team. The same bent toward mischief that had cast a cloud over his brief tenure at Ohio University landed the fun-loving Newman in a barroom brouhaha during his junior year at Kenyon, and he ended up spending a night in jail. He was also dismissed from the football team. Left with plenty of time on his hands, Newman turned to acting, though, as he would later recall, "I was probably one of the worst college actors in history. I learned my lines by rote and simply said them." Newman nonetheless found work acting in summer stock after finishing out his B.A. in 1949, and he later landed a job with the Woodstock Players company in Chicago, where he remained for one season. After his father died in 1950, he returned to Cleveland at his mother's bidding to take over management of the family business. A restless Newman stayed on until the store was sold a year later, but his aversion to retail sales was so strong that, as he later reported to one interviewer, "I wasn't driven to acting by any inner compulsion. I was running away from the sporting goods business."
Returning wholeheartedly to acting, Newman attended a year of drama classes at Yale, and then moved to New York. Television gigs were readily available to him there, and in 1954 he made his Broadway debut in a production of Picnic. Suddenly, movie offers began pouring in, and eventually the journeyman thespian chose the biblical epic The Silver Chalice for his feature-film debut. "I kept turning down films when I was in Picnic," Newman later related, "and then somebody said, after a couple of Budweisers, 'You know, they knock and they knock and at some point they stop knocking,' and that stuck in my head. I thought, 'When will they stop?' And the last knock was The Silver Chalice." The film proved decidedly forgettable, and Newman beat a hasty retreat back to television, signing on to appear in an adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway short story "The Battler" that was to have featured James Dean in the title role of an aging fighter. Following Dean's tragic death, the movie's producers gave Newman the lead, and he portrayed the petered-out pugilist so convincingly that director Robert Wise offered him the lead role of hoodlum-turned-prizefighter Rocky Graziano in the boxing biopic Somebody up There Likes Me.
Newman's acting career was reborn with a vengeance, and just two years later, he earned his first Best Actor Oscar nomination for his blisteringly sensual performance opposite Elizabeth Taylor in an adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The movie was 1958's top box office attraction, and Newman became a bona fide cinematic superstar almost overnight. Throughout the sixties and seventies, Newman enjoyed a dual reign as the most bankable face in cinema and one of its most celebrated talents, triumphing both critically and commercially in such films as The Hustler, Hud, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Sting. Though his box office drawing power began to be eclipsed by that of younger stars during the eighties, Newman's remarkable talent continued to mature, and he garnered Best Actor Oscar noms for 1981's Absence of Malice, 1982's The Verdict, and 1986's The Color of Money, which brought him his first statuette on his seventh try. His film career continued rolling on into the nineties, with 1994 witnessing both his flair for comedy, in The Hudsucker Proxy, and his dramatic grace, in Nobody's Fool.
Though his first crack at matrimony ended in divorce, Newman thereafter embarked on perhaps the most enduring and stable celebrity marriage in Hollywood history when he wed actress Joanne Woodward, whom he met on Broadway in 1958. A devoted family man and father of six, he launched the Newman's Own line of food products in 1987, beginning with salad dressings and spaghetti sauces, to provide a running source of income for his prodigious involvement with charitable foundations. He and Woodward also established the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp for children with terminal diseases and the antidrug Scott Newman Foundation, established in memory of Newman's only son, who died of an accidental drug overdose in 1978. In 1998, the legendary actor returned to the silver screen following a four-year hiatus to headline the detective noir Twilight. The wait for his next film wasn't nearly as long: early 1999 witnessed him in a supporting role in the Kevin Costner-Robin Wright Penn romance Message in a Bottle. Newman has two projects simmering on the back burner, a Merchant-Ivory adaptation of Diary of a Mad Old Man; and an adaptation of the Western-exodus novel The Homesman, which he hopes to write, direct and produce. He's also set to take on a lead role in an adaptation of Twilight scribe Richard Russo's novel Straight Man, which will reteam Newman with his Twilight co-stars, Susan Sarandon and Gene Hackman.
Newman's Own Organics - The Second Generation The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp Brilliant Careers - Paul Newman Paul Newman at Reel Classics Page Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, NYC - Paul Newman
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