Actor, racer, and philanthropist Paul Newman died 26 September 2008 of cancer. Born Paul Leonard Newman in Shaker Heights, Ohio, on 26 January 1925, he won an Academy Award for Best Actor (for 1986’s The Color of Money), and an Emmy in 2005 for Best Supporting Actor for Empire Falls. He was also nominated for nine other Oscars (eight for Best Actor, one for Best Supporting Actor, and one for Best Picture).
Newman appeared on Broadway, on television, and in more than 65 movies, starting with the much-maligned The Silver Chalice in 1954. His next film, however, 1956’s Somebody Up There Likes Me made him a star playing boxer Rocky Graziano. Since then, he has appeared in numerous iconic movies, including The Long, Hot Summer (1958), The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Sting (1973), The Towering Inferno (1974), Slap Shot (1977), The Verdict (1982), The Color of Money (1986), and Road to Perdition (2002).
Newman’s few genre appearances include: Cars (2006), two appearances on HypaSpace (2006), Magnificent Desoltion: Walking on the Moon 3D (2005), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), Come Along with Me (1982), Quintet (1979), and Tales of Tomorrow (1952).
Newman was also a successful race car driver and racing team owner, competing at Le Mans and winning several Sports Car Club of America national driving titles.
In 1982, he also went into the food business, bottling and selling a salad dressing he’d been making for friends. “Newman’s Own” grew into a multi-million dollar enterprise, from which all the profits (more than $200 million to date) have been donated to charity.
His oldest child, son Scott, died of an overdose of alcohol and drugs on 28 November 1978. In his memory, Newman established the Scott Newman Center, to publicize the dangeres of alcohol and drugs. His eldest daughter, Susan Newman, runs the Center.
In addition to his professional successes, Newman was also known in Hollywood for his fifty-year marriage to actress Joanne Woodward (the two married on 29 January 1958). Together, they had three daughters. Newman’s three other children were with his first wife, Jackie Witte (they were married from 1949 to 1958). Newman and Woodward co-starred in several pictures, and his Oscar nomination for Best Picture, for Rachel, Rachel (1968), was a film in which he directed his wife.
He is survived by his wife, five daughters, two grandchildren, and one brother.
Strangely enough, my favorite Newman film is a genre film almost no one has ever heard of: Quintet. In a world freezing to death in a new Ice Age, the survivors huddle together playing a strange version of Dungeons and Dragons, where real people die. Newman’s character, an ice fisherman who brings his pregnant wife to civilization so she can give birth, gets caught up in the game. It’s a last-man-standing story with wit, mystery, cynicism and panache. Newman plays his Everyman with his customary sharp cool. It’s not a great film, but it wears at least as well as something like “Planet of the Apes”. Robert Altman wrote and directed this nihilistic view of the end of civilization, which is not about people adapting to change but succumbing to it. The film is slow paced and deliberate, and opinion has long been divided, but it’s a showcase for Newman in an unusual setting. I’ve never been able to forget it.