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Paul Newman
The embarrassing thing is that the salad dressing is out-grossing my films.
— Paul Newman
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 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.
The embarrassing thing is that the salad dressing is out-grossing my films.
— Paul Newman
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 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.
Occupation: Actor, Director, Philanthropist, Producer, Screenwriter, Professional auto racer
Date of Birth: January 26, 1925
Place of Birth: Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Sign: Sun in Aquarius, Moon in Pisces
Relations: Father: Arthur (sporting goods store owner; deceased); mother: Theresa; brother: Arthur (producer, production manager); wife: Joanne Woodward (actress); ex-wife: Jackie Witte (actress); kids: Scott (deceased), Susan, Stephanie, Elinor (food sales executive), Melissa (singer), Claire (a.k.a. Clea)
Education: Ohio University; Kenyon College; Yale Drama School; Actor’s Studio
Fan Mail: C/O International Creative Management
8942 Wilshire Blvd.
Beverly Hills, CA 90211
USA.
Paul Newman: Credits
MOVIES
Actor
Where the Money Is — 2000
Message in a Bottle — 1999
Twilight — 1998
Nobody’s Fool — 1994
The Hudsucker Proxy — 1994
Mr. and Mrs. Bridge — 1990
Fat Man and Little Boy — 1989
Blaze — 1989
John Huston: The Man, The Movies, The Maverick — 1988
The Color of Money — 1986
Harry and Son — 1984
The Verdict — 1982
Absence of Malice — 1981
Fort Apache, The Bronx — 1981
When Time Ran Out — 1980
Quintet — 1979
Slap Shot — 1977
The Drowning Pool — 1976
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson — 1976
Silent Movie — 1976
The Towering Inferno — 1974
The Sting — 1973
The Mackintosh Man — 1973
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean — 1972
Pocket Money — 1972
Never Give an Inch — 1971
WUSA — 1970
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid — 1969
Winning — 1969
The Secret War of Harry Frigg — 1968
Cool Hand Luke — 1967
Hombre — 1967
Torn Curtain — 1966
Harper — 1966
Lady L — 1965
The Outrage — 1964
What a Way To Go! — 1964
Outrage — 1964
Hud — 1963
The Prize — 1963
A New Kind of Love — 1963
Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man — 1962
Sweet Bird of Youth — 1962
Adventures of a Young Man — 1962
The Hustler — 1961
Paris Blues — 1961
From the Terrace — 1960
Exodus — 1960
The Young Philadelphians — 1959
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof — 1958
Rally Round the Flag, Boys! — 1958
The Long Hot Summer — 1958
The Left-Handed Gun — 1958
Until They Sail — 1957
The Helen Morgan Story — 1957
The Rack — 1956
Somebody Up There Likes Me — 1956
The Silver Chalice — 1954
Director
The Glass Menagerie — 1987
Harry and Son — 1984
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds — 1972
Sometimes a Great Notion — 1971
Never Give an Inch — 1971
The Secret War of Harry Frigg — 1968
Rachel, Rachel — 1968
Producer
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds — 1972
The Secret War of Harry Frigg — 1968
Other Movie Credits
Harry and Son — 1984 (Co-Producer)
Harry and Son — 1984 (Co-Screenwriter)
The Drowning Pool — 1976 (Co-Executive Producer)
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean — 1972 (Co-Executive Producer)
Pocket Money — 1972 (Co-Executive Producer)
Sometimes a Great Notion — 1971 (Co-Executive Producer)
WUSA — 1970 (Co-Producer)
King: A Filmed Record . . . Montgomery to Memphis — 1970 (Co-Narrator)
Winning — 1969 (Co-Executive Producer)
BOOKS
Newman’s Own Cookbook: A Veritable Cornucopia of Recipes
TV
Miracle on 44th Street: A Portrait of the Actor’s Studio — 1991 (Host)
Havel’s Audience with History — 1990 (Host, Narrator)
Ancient Forests: Rage Over Trees — 1989 (Narrator)
The Shadow Box — 1980 (Director only)
Once Upon a Car — 1971 (Special; narrator)
The U.S. Steel Hour — 1956 (Episode)
The Kaiser Aluminum Hour — 1956 (Episode)
Playwright’s ‘56 — 1956 (Episode)
Producer’s Showcase — 1955 (Special)
Goodyear Playhouse — 1954 (Episode)
Danger — 1954 (Series; appearance)
You Are There — 1953 (Guest star)
Kraft Television Theatre — 1952 (Appearance)
Newman, Paul Web sites
Where the Money Is video chat
Paul Newman stars as a career thief that has been transferred to a nursing home. Official movie site includes Quicktime clips, postcards, Newman timeline and message boards.
http://www.wherethemoneyismovie.com/
Last reviewed by DottieHinkle
Newman’s Own
Focus here is more about Newman’s charitable culinary creations (pasta sauces, dressings, etc.) than on the actor that makes them.
http://www.newmansown.com/whats_new/default.html
Paul Newman
Biography from Baseline’s Encyclopedia of Film.
http://www.milams.com/newman.htm
Photo Gallery:
Topics: Actor, Celebrities, Director, Producer, Screenwriter
Tags: Actor, Danger, Director, Goodyear Playhouse, Philanthropist, Pocket Money, Producer, Professional auto racer, Screenwriter, WUSA
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