Paul Newman Dies

Actor, racer, entrepreneur, philanthropist and all round good egg, Paul Newman has gone West.

The evergreen actor and half of the Newman-Haas racing team died earlier today after a one-year fight with cancer.

May he rest in peace.

I thought I woudl write something about Newman, after all he was a childhood hero but then I realised that all I knew about him was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and his racing team so I did what every self-respecting blogger did, I trawled the internet and found you this gem from the San Jose Mercury News.

Here are some of my favourite excerpts from the piece

Enjoy

Paul Newman, coolest hand in Hollywood, dead at 83

By Bruce Newman
Mercury News

… his proudest achievement may have been his 50-year marriage to actress Joanne Woodward. When asked about the durability of their marriage in the face of the temptations that come to any Hollywood leading man, Newman replied with characteristic dry wit. “Why fool around with hamburger when you have steak at home?” he said.

From the beginning, Newman put sizzle in the sexuality of his characters, such as Hud, the unrepentant lout he played in 1964. “The only question I ever ask a woman,” Hud says, “is ‘What time is your husband coming home?'” White T-shirt sales went through the roof.

He was one of only five actors ever nominated for an Oscar in five different decades, finally winning the best actor award for which he was nominated seven times for his reprise of “Fast” Eddie Felson in “The Color of Money,” Martin Scorsese’s overlit, over-directed 1986 sequel to “The Hustler.” The belated Oscar may have been a make-up
… He was Hollywood’s top box office star in 1969 and ’70. “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” remains the highest-grossing Western of all time,

… he actually missed his first turn as a matinee idol following a screen test for the 1955 film “East of Eden.”

He and James Dean shot the test together, but Dean won the star-making role of Cal Trask, while Newman got the Warner Bros. booby prize as the lead in “The Silver Chalice—”a flop so spectacular that he later took an ad in Variety to apologize for his performance.

Forced to return to Cleveland when his father died in 1950 to take over the family sporting goods business, he quickly sold it and enrolled at Yale drama school. “I wasn’t driven to acting by any inner compulsion,” he told Time magazine in 1982. “I was running away from the sporting goods business.”

When the roles he was offered in the early ’70s became less challenging, he ran away from acting—particularly assembly-line garbage like “The Towering Inferno—”to pursue a new passion for driving race cars that had emerged while making the 1969 trackside drama “Winning.”

His greatest performance was as the alcoholic ambulance-chaser Frank Galvin in the 1982 courtroom drama “The Verdict.” Newman allowed his face to be photographed in a way that, for the first time, revealed the ravages of age, and he permitted himself to discover in the character the ravages of the soul that great acting can reveal. “It’s so comforting not to have to be a movie star…,” he said in an interview. “It’s a relief to have an unprotected character to play. This guy’s an open wound.”

Newman sometimes ran away from his good looks, but never too far. He was sometimes cool to the swooning over his famous blue eyes, but in part that was because he couldn’t see them himself. Newman was color blind.

“I would like it if people would think that…there’s a spirit that takes action, a heart and a talent that doesn’t come from my blue eyes,” he told an interviewer once. “I picture my epitaph: —Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.”

It never happened. His eyes remained the bluest blue, his fans the truest blue. And Paul Newman died holding the coolest hand of all.