My interview with a Hollywood legend | Appreciation | Movie world pays tribute

With his engaging smile, the sardonic twinkle in his piercing blue eyes and his cool, confident air, Paul Newman was a consummate charmer, easily passing the test of superstardom.

However, his aversion to the Californian lifestyle was never disguised. He preferred to stay well away from the glitzy milieu when he was not working there and dedicated himself to his charities, businesses, racing cars, family and wife, Joanne Woodward.

Famously faithful to her, he once joked: “Why go out for hamburger when you have steak at home?” She hated the metaphor.

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Explaining their relationship on another occasion, he said: “I make all the big decisions and she makes all the little decisions. For instance, if I want to live in California and she wants to live in Connecticut, we live in Connecticut. That’s not important, that’s geography.

“If she wanted the children to go to a certain school and I wanted them to go to a different one, they go to the one she wanted them to go to. Those things are really not important decisions. If she insists I become a Democrat, not a Republican, then I become a Democrat. Those things are not important.

“But the things that are important are: what will be our foreign policy decision regarding China? Those are the things I take to heart and she has the little decisions.”

Last January Newman and Woodward celebrated their golden wedding at their home in Westport, Connecticut, for which they left Beverly Hills in 1962.

Despite the long and happy relationship, both have confessed to competitive tensions. Woodward said the years of trying to be a model home-maker “almost broke up my marriage” and that she felt overshadowed by him professionally.

Only once in their happy half-century did he actually walk out on her. He returned 10 minutes later because he had no idea where he could go.

Newman was the last survivor of a spectacular trio of young actors who emerged from New York in the 1950s to conquer Hollywood. At that time he would have seemed the least impressive of the three.

Marlon Brando was mesmeric in A Streetcar Named Desire and James Dean’s performance in East of Eden was one of the most exciting film debuts ever made. Newman’s first film, The Silver Chalice, was a biblical dud in which he played a slave improbably called Basil, flaunting his tanned calves in a male mini-dress.

Throughout his life he would wince whenever the title was mentioned, even taking out a full-page advertisement apolo-gising when the film appeared on television.

Yet of the three actors he had the constancy to achieve the most sustained and fulfilled career. Brando was to squander his extraordinary greatness. Dean, after only three films, died at 24 behind the wheel of his Porsche Spyder. Newman took over what was to have been Dean’s next part, that of the young boxer Rocky Graziano in the biopic Somebody Up There Likes Me. The ensuing rave reviews and healthy box-office figures made him a star.

For all his charm he was wary of his fans, once saying: “If people come up to me, perfect strangers, and ask me to take off my dark glasses so they can have a look at my eyes, I just say, ‘Is that all you think of me?’ Are they going to write on my tombstone, ‘Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown’?”

Another time he snapped: “If people start treating you like a piece of meat or a long-lost friend or feel they can become cuddly for the price of a five-dollar movie ticket, then you shut them out.”

Paul Leonard Newman was born in Shaker Heights, Cleve-land, Ohio on January 26, 1925. His father was Jewish, his mother a Catholic who turned Christian Scientist. He was their second son. The family were prosperous, owning a successful sporting goods retail business. His father was a good businessman with tough standards. If young Paul wanted a baseball mitt, even though the store was stuffed with them he would first have to earn the money to pay for it.

“He survived the 1930s depression because of his reputation for honesty,” Newman said in an interview six years ago. “I learnt something about morality from him.”

At high school he discovered enjoyment in acting. He had a few months at Ohio University studying economics before being called for war service. Applying for naval pilot training he was rejected, not just for his then puny build, but also because his blue eyes were colour blind. He became a radio operator and rear gunner on torpedo bombers instead.

After service in the Pacific he enrolled at Kenyon college, a private liberal arts institution in Ohio. He was in trouble after a bar room fight between the football team and town youths and lost his place as a line-backer. Acting was now his big interest and after graduating “magna cum lager”, as he put it, he acted in summer stock.

He married an actress and model called Jackie Witte and when she was pregnant with their first baby his father died at 56. Newman Sr always regretted that he never lived to see his apparently feckless son achieve success.

Newman went on to study acting at Yale, financing himself by selling encyclopaedias when his government grant ran out. From there it was a short hop to New York and the Actors Studio under Lee Stras-berg, where “the Method” was taught to those deemed talented enough to enrol.

Extraordinarily handsome, with a profile that looked as if it should be on a Roman coin, he soon attracted casting agents.

He met Woodward in 1953 on Broadway when they were understudies in the same play. Once in Hollywood they were cast opposite each other in The Long, Hot Summer. Newman divorced his first wife, and married Woodward in 1958.

His defining film role did not come until 1961 when he played “Fast Eddie” Felson, a glib champion pool player mercilessly manipulated by a wily and ruthless George C Scott in The Hustler. At last Newman’s strength, subtlety and intelligence was recognised, enabling him to shake off the pretty face handicap that had bedevilled his early films.

He followed this success as an unprincipled, amoral, selfish Texan cattle-raiser in Hud, one of the greatest redneck characterisations ever, and it was another big hit.

Of the many roles he played subsequently, the joke-heavy buddy movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in which he teamed up with Robert Redford to play a pair of bank and train robbers, has proved one of the most memorable. There was talk a year or two ago of a reunion with Redford, but it came to nothing, and last year Newman announced his definite retirement, citing problems with memorising lines, acting confidence and invention.

He was to have directed Of Mice and Men, due to open in October at the Westport Country Playhouse, close to his home, but in May stepped down for health reasons. He was quietly being treated at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, and lung cancer (he had for years been a heavy smoker) was suspected.

Interviewing Newman was always a pleasure, especially if his wife was around, when he was totally at ease. But it sometimes needed patience to get him to deliver. “Well ...” he would say, followed by a deathly pause and a monosyllabic “Yup” or “Nope”.

I have a tape of a live interview for the BBC nearly 30 years ago in which he grows ever more laconic, until eventually the interviewer seems to be doing all the talking. There was nothing malicious in this, it was just the way the man was.

Salad dressings sprinkled £135m on charity

Paul Newman was a star you could look up to both on and off the screen.

In his lifetime he raised more than £135m for charity, primarily from his food company, Newman’s Own.

He founded the company in 1982 with his next-door neighbour A E Hotchner, the biographer of Ernest Hemingway.

The brand, with Newman’s face on the jar, began with salad dressing before expanding into other products such as pasta sauce, salsa and wines.

All the proceeds, after taxes, have gone to a variety of charities.

“Paul’s heart and soul were dedicated to helping to make the world a better place for all,” said Robert Forrester, vice-chairman of the Newman’s Own Foundation.

“What started as almost something of a joke in the basement of his home turned into a highly respected multi-million-dollar-a-year food company.

“And, true to form, he shared this good fortune by donating all the profits and royalties to many charities around the world.”

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