Those eyes, that face | Movie world pays tribute | Interview with a legend

Paul Newman and glamour were indivisible. It was sometimes said of him, even by those who purported to admire him, that his good looks carried him effortlessly through his screen career, without any tangible application of talent. “Handsome”, and therefore “limited”, were the epithets often waspishly applied to diminish his achievement when measuring it against that of other “serious” actors.

A preternaturally 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 genial romps as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973) — both with Robert Redford — which nevertheless remain enduring classics of their genre.

But he was an actor of far greater variety and range than this might suggest. A New York Actors’ Studio-trained player, he had afterwards cut his teeth 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 (1961), in which his would-be tough but youthful rookie is brilliantly cast against the icy assurance of the mature George C. Scott is remarkable in its depiction of a brittle character gradually collapsing under the unrelenting pressures of his chosen modus vivendi.

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Of all the actors now at work in Hollywood he is the only one to mark every film he is in decisively with his own personality

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The sheer tour de force of his depiction of an indomitable convict in a Southern country jail in Cool Hand Luke (1967) is a simply indelible one and as good as anything he did. 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 — an injustice against which there is no appeal. None of these performances suggests a character freewheeling through the Hollywood landscape, and of them all Cool Hand Luke is perhaps the most memorable in the power of its protagonist to create in his fellow inmates a belief in justice for the human condition where we know that there will be none.

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 well 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 gifted second wife, the actress Joanne Woodward, whom he directed in a number of films. Both were political activists in the Democratic interest, and campaigned for a wide range of liberal causes.

Paul Newman was born in 1925 in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, where his father ran a sporting goods store. His father was Jewish and his mother came from a Roman Catholic family in what is now Slovakia, though she later converted to Christian Science. 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 straight into repertory theatre. From here he went into daytime television, and by 1953 into his first Broadway production, William Inge’s Picnic. Playing a lesser role and understudying the lead, 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 understudying in Picnic 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. As late as 2005 they appeared, though not together, in the two-part TV spectacular Empire Falls.

Newman’s first film role was the lead in a disastrous Roman epic called The Silver Chalice (1954), which brought forth misleading comparisons with Marlon Brando and 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 process, in this case the fabric of 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 during what in retrospect was seen as a Golden Age for the medium in America. They included Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, with Eva Marie Saint and Frank Sinatra. He also, on occasion, returned to his first love, the stage.

In the cinema he was a startlingly original Billy the Kid in The Left Handed Gun (1958), the first film directed by Arthur Penn, with whom he had worked in television. Newman’s Billy was a psychological study which owed much to the Method. 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, Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Elizabeth Taylor, which brought his first Oscar nomination, and an eccentric but intermittently hilarious Leo McCarey comedy, Rally Round the Flag, Boys, again with Woodward. In 1959 he was back on Broadway in the premiere of another Tennessee Williams play, Sweet Bird of Youth — a role he subsequently re-created, less successfully, on film.