Paul Newman, 100 years of the most intense blue gaze in cinema
The actor, born in Ohio on January 26, 1925, is an inseparable and indisputable part of the history of the United States in the 20th century
On January 26, 1925, the small street of Renrock Road in Cleveland Heights, in the suburbs of Cleveland (Ohio), woke up snowy and icy enough for the Newman couple, Art and Theresa, to decide that their second child, Paul Leonard, should be born at home: 2025 marks the centenary of Newman’s birth, an actor who was possibly not the best among his peers, but arguably the most handsome and the one who best connected with his era and his generation, the owner of the most intense blue eyes in Hollywood. He was tenacious, intelligent, a charmer and an icon of the 20th century. He triumphed in the cinema and in motor racing, the passion that truly filled his life. And, incidentally, he drank countless liters of beer throughout his life: that’s why, for years, he wore a chain around his neck with a bottle opener. His genes and constant exercise allowed his prodigious physique to not be affected by his alcoholism.
Today, Newman’s echo remains among film buffs thanks to his flair and, above all, the fact that he knew how to select brilliant projects in the later decades of his life. He did not end up being dragged across the screen. His considerable social work also left its mark: he triumphed in the world of sauces and the food industry with his company Newman’s Own, which was a great source of income for his summer camps for children with cancer and for all his initiatives “to give back to society” what he had received from it. And then there are his legendary performances in The Hustler, Cool Hand Luke, Hud, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Verdict, Nobody’s Fool or Road to Perdition. He received nine Oscar nominations for acting, ultimately winning a statuette for The Color of Money.
In recent years, the re-examination of Newman’s figure has served to revalue that of his wife, Joanne Woodward, who was more talented than her husband, according to critics, although not as brutally magnetic. “I am faced with the frightening fact that I know nothing [...] I am always anxious to admit that I am not good enough,” said Newman himself in his attempt to write a memoir. In 1986, Newman asked his friend Stewart Stern to interview all his acquaintances, relatives, and fellow filmmakers, and even to speak with him himself in order to prepare this biography. These conversations were stored on hundreds of cassettes... until in 1991 he became disillusioned and abandoned the project. In 1998, he burned all the tapes.
However, in a cupboard in the family home, stored in some boxes, 5,000 pages remained with the transcriptions of all the material. And those pages have proved to be — in book format (The extraordinary life of an ordinary man) and television (The Last Movie Stars, directed by Ethan Hawke and released on Max) — the final illuminations, and certainly the most sincere, of the universe of Newman, the man who ended up hiding his eyes from the rest of the world behind the parapet of his sunglasses and who was always guarded his privacy jealously.
The best reflection on Newman was written by critic Roger Ebert at the premiere of Nobody’s Fool, a film that sums up all the stages and styles of his career: “Like Brando, Newman studied the Method. Like Brando, Newman looked good in an undershirt. Unlike Brando, Newman went on to study life, and so while Brando broke through and then wandered aimlessly in inexplicable roles, Newman continued to work on his craft. Having seen what he could put in, he went on to see what he could leave out.” Ebert speaks of a man who became a star in the late 1950s and who became professionally obsessed with a single commandment: to make good films.
Newman was not destined to act but to run — together with his older brother — his father’s business, a sporting goods store, a destiny that loomed over him as he ran around the garden of his house in Shaker Heights, another Cleveland suburb where the Newmans moved when their youngest son turned two. But “Newman luck” entered stage left: one of his favorite sayings was “luck is an art,” a phrase that his grandchildren have tattooed on them. From high school, he was hooked on acting. He served in Navy aviation in the Second World War, where on two occasions his luck spared him from being killed in combat. After the war, Newman resumed his university studies at Kenyon College, where he graduated, after many parties, in drama and economics, although he preferred to say that he had graduated “Magna cum Lager.”
At university, Newman made his stage debut as Hildy Johnson in Front Page. He began to combine the end of his studies with theater tours and his marriage to another aspiring actress, Jacqueline Witte, at the age of 24. That was how he arrived in New York, television, and the legendary Actors Studio, where, in another example of “Newman luck,” he accompanied a friend to an audition. She was not accepted, but he, who was out for a walk, was. “They made a mistake and interpreted my sincere horror as a sincere performance,” he said jokingly. With his cynicism he created smokescreens about his resume: Elia Kazan claimed that if Brando was the greatest, Newman beat him for hardest worker.
Newman and Joanne Woodward met in 1952, in an agent’s office. There were no fireworks. They acted together in the play Picnic on Broadway a year later. There, they did leave “a trail of lust,” in Newman’s words, and from 1958 they became a married couple, a model for many who were unaware of the numerous storms they went through: not only because of Newman’s alcoholism — which subsided somewhat when Woodward threatened him with divorce and he focused on beer, abandoning stronger liquor — but because she took care of his three children from his first marriage as if she were their mother, and because Newman was unfaithful to her on various occasions. In the end, after overcoming the obstacles, they became an admirable couple, married until his death in 2008. Woodward, 94, remains in the family home in Westport, Connecticut, in the middle of a glorious estate, safe from prying eyes since she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2007 — nine days before Newman was told he had cancer — and cared for by her daughters.
Newman is an indisputable and inseparable part of American history. As an old-school Democrat, who fought for a better world all his life (to his pride, President Richard Nixon included him, as number 19, on his list of greatest enemies). As a successful driver and racing team owner, a passion that he abandoned even later than acting, and which he combined in his final projects, lending his voice to the legendary Doc Hudson in the Cars saga. As a businessman who invested with talent. As a director, especially when the movie starred Woodward. And as an actor: American cinema without Newman would not have been so complete.
No comments:
Post a Comment