Paul Newman, 1925 - 2008.

Paul Newman, the Academy-Award winning superstar who personified cool as an activist, race car driver, popcorn impresario, and the anti-hero of such films as Hud, Cool Hand Luke and The Color of Money, has died. He was 83....

Newman worked with some of the greatest directors of the past half century, from Alfred Hitchcock and John Huston to Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers. His co-stars included Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Bacall, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks and, most famously, Robert Redford, his sidekick in Butch Cassidy and The Sting.

The AP.

Updated through 10/4.

If Marlon Brando and James Dean defined the defiant American male as a sullen rebel, Paul Newman recreated him as a likable renegade, a strikingly handsome figure of animal high spirits and blue-eyed candor whose magnetism was almost impossible to resist, whether the character was Hud, Cool Hand Luke or Butch Cassidy.

He acted in more than 65 movies over more than 50 years, drawing on a physical grace, unassuming intelligence and good humor that made it all seem effortless. Yet he was also an ambitious, intellectual actor and a passionate student of his craft, and he achieved what most of his peers find impossible: remaining a major star into craggy, charismatic old age.

Aljean Harmetz, New York Times.

He sometimes teamed with his wife and fellow Oscar winner, Joanne Woodward, with whom he had one of Hollywood's rare long-term marriages. "I have steak at home, why go out for hamburger?" Newman told Playboy magazine when asked if he was tempted to stray. They wed in 1958, around the same time they both appeared in The Long Hot Summer, and Newman directed her in several films, including Rachel, Rachel and The Glass Menagerie.

With his strong, classically handsome face and piercing blue eyes, Newman was a heartthrob just as likely to play against his looks, becoming a favorite with critics for his convincing portrayals of rebels, tough guys and losers. "I was always a character actor," he once said. "I just looked like Little Red Riding Hood."

Newman had a soft spot for underdogs in real life, giving tens of millions to charities through his food company and setting up camps for severely ill children. Passionately opposed to the Vietnam War, and in favor of civil rights, he was so famously liberal that he ended up on President Nixon's "enemies list," one of the actor's proudest achievements, he liked to say.

Again, the AP.

See also: the Wikipedia entry and "Times Topics."

"If you're going to introduce a younger movie buff to the unique charisma of the Paul Newman – well, where do you begin?" Joe Leydon presents an annotated list of "movies to use while tutoring the uninitiated."

"Newman never stopped believing he was a regular guy who'd simply been blessed, and well beyond what was fair," writes Dahlia Lithwick in Slate, looking back on the founding of the Hole in the Wall Camp. "So he just kept on paying it forward. He appreciated great ideas for doing good in the world - he collected them the way other people collect their own press clippings - and he didn't care where they came from. Whether you were a college kid, a pediatric oncologist, or a Hollywood tycoon, if you had a nutty plan to make life better for someone, he'd write the check himself or hook you up with somebody who would."

Shawn Levy, whose biography of Newman will be published next fall, has a must-read appreciation in the Oregonian:

Fast Eddie Felson. Hud Bannon. Cool Hand Luke. Butch Cassidy. The guy in the race car. The guy on the salad dressing bottle. The blue-eyed dreamboat. The committed public citizen. The husband of a half-century. The father of six....

For a half-century, on screen and off, the actor Paul Newman embodied certain tendencies in the American male character: active and roguish and earnest and sly and determined and vulnerable and brave and humble and reliable and compassionate and fair. He was a man of his time, a part of his time, and that time ranged from World War II to the contemporary era of digitally animated feature films.... His career spanned eras, and he always seemed to be in step and in style.

"[B]eing a sex symbol and a great actor don't often exist within the same performer, but when they do, as in the case of Paul Newman, it's electric," writes Edward Copeland. "What's even more amazing about Newman, who has succumbed to cancer at 83, is that his sex appeal lasted well into his AARP years and his acting only seemed to get better as he aged."

"His performance in 1982's The Verdict is a rhapsody, the crown jewel of his career, and should be part of any acting school curriculum," argues JJ at As Little as Possible.

"Newman will live on forever in the movies. What an inarguably rich filmography he's left the audiences who loved him." Nathaniel R.

Esquire's running Scott Raab's May 2000 profile.

"For reasons I can't explain, Sweet Bird of Youth is the one movie starring Paul Newman that I've seen the most, along with Exodus." Peter Nellhaus.

Online listening tip. Beth Accomando on NPR.

Updates: "I don't think Mr Newman was ever as beautiful as he is in Hud," writes Manohla Dargis in the NYT: "His lean, hard-muscled body seems to slash against the widescreen landscape, evoking the oil derricks to come, and the black-and-white cinematography turns his famous baby blues an eerie shade of gray.... He's superb in The Color of Money, gracefully navigating its slick surfaces and periodically scratching beneath them, playing a variation on what had by then in movies like The Drowning Pool (1975), Slap Shot (1977) and The Verdict (1982) become a defining Paul Newman type: the guy on the hustle who seems to have nothing much left but keeps his motor running, just in case." And there's an audio slide show, too.

In Vanity Fair: Patricia Bosworth's collection of reminiscences for the September 08 issue; and a slide show.

"Instead of leading his talent in weird and wayward directions, like Brando, or smashing it to pieces on a California highway at 24, like Dean, he just kept getting better, more comfortable in his movie skin, more proficient at suggesting worlds of flinty pleasure or sour disillusion with a smile or a squint," writes Richard Corliss in Time. "Then Newman did something really remarkable: He sustained that early promise for five decades."

"What was the secret to Newman's longevity?" asks Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "The fact that he always took the work seriously without ever doing the same to himself probably helped. A quick scan of his notable quotes at Wikipedia reveals one hilariously self-deprecating proclamation after another, such as 'I wasn't driven to acting by any inner compulsion. I was running away from the sporting goods business,' and 'The embarrassing thing is that my salad dressing is out-grossing my films.' Perhaps his side interests in directing theater and racing cars made him seem all the more like a screen legend - it's the ones who could leave the business at any time who seem to get the most respect."

"If ever there was a walking embodiment of liberalism at its best and in all its manifestations, it was Paul Newman," writes Bob Westal. "[H]e was as respectable a human being as the world of show business has seen. I'm an agnostic, but I'd still like like to think that, wherever Mr. Newman is, he'll get to watch the election returns. It seems a small reward."

"In a career studded with remarkable achievements, Newman's greatest work of art might simply have been his ability to lead a fulfilled life outside of the glamour of being an icon," writes Paul Harris in the Guardian, where Brian Baxter looks back over the career and Phil Hoad rounds up clips.

Ned Lamont, who ran unsuccessfully against Joe Leiberman in Connecticut in 06, recalls Newman's help. Via Movie City Indie.

"James Stewart once said that film actors give their audiences 'pieces of time,'" writes the Observer's Philip French. "While Newman's best pictures hang together as creative entities (there is a kind of perfection to The Hustler and to the western Hombre), as with other actors it is unforgettable moments and sequences that come to mind and revive memories of being moved to laughter, tears, reflection, self-examination."

"If I had to pick just one favorite Newman/Woodward film it would probably be Paris Blues," writes Kimberly Lindbergs. "Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier play American jazz musicians living in Paris whose lives are disrupted when two beautiful tourists (Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll) visit the city of lights for a two-week holiday..... [I]f you're interested in seeing Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward at their loveliest, I highly recommend seeking out the movie."

Robert Horton: "If anybody is near Port Townsend, Washington, Sunday afternoon and looking for a place to talk about Paul Newman, the Port Townsend Film Festival will be convening an impromptu panel on the subject - with Piper Laurie (Newman's Oscar-nominated co-star in The Hustler) and Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne speaking on the subject; I will act as moderator. Time's 12:45, Sunday the 28th, at the PTFF Hospitality Tent."

AJ Schnack notes that two of the last films he worked on were docs (he narrated): The Price of Sugar and Dale.

"One of my earliest memories of Paul Newman outside of the movies was watching him on Phil Donahue debate nuclear proliferation with some Edward Teller type decrying Newman and anyone like him as wet noodle pinkos." Jonathan Lapper relates that memory.

Updates, 9/28: "I've interviewed hundreds of movie people during my journalism career, but rarely was I given the inside look that I got on those two racing weekends with Newman." And Jack Matthews would remain friends with him for years to come. Also at Movie City News, Leonard Klady: "Lightness doesn't quite get across what made him unique and calling him deft at his craft makes it sound much too facile. There may have been others that worked as hard at making it look like they were making it up as they went along, but offhand I can't think of anyone less studied and more committed to what they did."

"The actor was proudest, friends say, of his later Oscar-nominated roles in Absence of Malice, The Verdict and Nobody's Fool, in which he dug deep into the complex emotions of ordinary men struggling for dignity, justice or a sense of connection," reports Lynn Smith in the Los Angeles Times. "In 2003, he was nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actor for his last feature film appearance, as a conflicted mob boss in Road to Perdition. Two years later, at 80, he won an Emmy for playing a meddlesome father in Empire Falls. 'He's a majestic figure in the world of acting,' said director Arthur Penn, who worked with him in his early career. 'He did everything and did it well.'"

Joe Leydon's December 06 profile for Cowboys & Indians.

"He is undoubtedly in the top 10 of all-time great movie stars," writes Barry Norman in the Independent. "Whereabouts I don't know, but he was undoubtedly a great star. Unlike many of the great stars, though, Newman was a very, very good actor."

"[F]ew remembered Mr Newman the way his friend and neighbor did in Westport, a Fairfield County town of about 26,000." Manny Fernandez talks with AE Hotchner for the NYT.

Updates, 10/2: Robert Redford in Time: "Both of us were fundamentally American actors, with the qualities and virtues that characterize American actors: irreverence, playing on the other's flaws for fun, one-upmanship - but always with an underlying affection. Those were also at the core of our relationship off the screen."

"He knew what a fortunate and wonderful life he had led, and he was very willing to admit that," recalls Sam Mendes, who directed Newman in Road to Perdition, for New York. "That really lent him an aura of a minor deity to me. He had sort of ascended already. He felt at peace, like he'd come to terms with what he'd done in his life and his own mortality. I think some of that must have stemmed - though he never spoke about it - from his son Scott's premature death. Once you've lived through that, I don't think anything else really gets as bad. Even your own death."

"The Newman performances that honestly made the greatest impression on me all came in movies that, to one degree or another, challenged my perceptions of Newman the star (unflappable, virile, righteous, self-righteous) and what those perceptions meant," writes Dennis Cozzalio. "They all depended greatly on the actor's considerable charm, of course, but they were almost always also willing to make it harder for audiences to accept that charismatic quality blindly—they didn't mask the characters' amorality behind those blue eyes but instead used them to investigate it. And each of the roles on my list made either overt or covert connections to that beer-drinking, blue-collar bravado that seemed, to some of us in the audience who never knew him personally, closest to Newman himself."

"The space he invited viewers into was a kind of hyperlife, a state of sharpened attention and heightened vibrancy; if Paul Newman was in it, it was a Paul Newman movie, regardless of the size of his role," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "His best roles were the ones that acknowledged that quality of being not superhuman, but somehow extra human."

The New York Observer's Sara Vilkomerson talks with Robert Benton: "He was, I think, one the best human beings I've ever known... one of the most decent, the most honorable. He was extraordinary. Of course, he would be appalled if he could hear me calling him a saint. It would have ended our friendship."

"[T]he Siren is here to talk about Newman's acting, and to remind us that charm does not follow naturally from being handsome, nor does possessing that quality in life mean you can bring it to the screen. Consider Alain Delon, an excellent actor with looks so perfect they seem a cosmic joke, but resolutely uncharming in role after role. Think of George Brent, a well-loved man in Hollywood but often a limp screen figure. Look at Peter Sellers and Rex Harrison, despised by colleagues but the picture of charm in so many movies. Charm is a learned technique for an actor. Either you choose not to use it, as the Siren presumes Delon has chosen, or you can only bring it out when the stars align, like Brent, or you learn to project it despite your real personality. Newman seems to have been a wonderful man in real life, but that's irrelevant to his talent. The things he was able to bring to the screen came from his dedication to acting, not the Good Fairy Merryweather hovering over his cradle."

"He looked like something Donatello might have dreamed up, his eyes turned down just the slightest bit at the corners, his mouth perpetually ready for kissing," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Still, we all know that great-looking actors are a dime a dozen. The best of them are also informed by something that comes from inside, a mischievous spark, a sly sense of self-deprecation that suggests they don't take themselves all that seriously (even when they take their work very seriously). Newman had both the face and the spark, which may be why he grew into his beauty, not out of it."

"Great actors and great artists don't have to be role models in life to inspire you with their work," writes David Edelstein. "But when they are, they give a special kind of joy. The character of his life is everywhere in his work, in its lack of self-centeredness, in the way it radiated out. In sad days and sunny ones, Paul Newman bathed the world in blue."

From an impressive survey by Roderick Heath: "One of Newman's most perfectly relaxed and entertaining performances came in Mark Robson's Hitchockian romp The Prize (1963), in which he played party animal Andrew Craig, the youngest-ever Nobel laureate in literature whose challenging early works were commercial flops, forcing him to write trash and drink much."

Sheila O'Malley at the House Next Door: "I'm a bit overwhelmed right now, but I want to hone in on three specific roles (or moments) of Newman's because, first of all, they span his career (beginning, middle, end), and, second of all, they illuminate the Newman-ness of Paul Newman, that indefinable thing that makes a good actor specific, memorable, and alive under imaginary circumstances."

"At a moment when America feels angry and betrayed, when our leaders have forfeited our trust and jeopardized our future, we lost an American icon who stood for traits that have been in short supply in the Bush administration: shrewdness, humility, decency, generosity, class." Maureen Dowd in the New York Times.

At Movie City News, Larry Gross recalls some of the great moments.

"While many of the recent tributes in his honor have contained their share of hyperbole and have perhaps made more out of Newman than was actually there, including assertions that the actor 'changed Hollywood,' these comments in themselves speak to the scarcity of such figures in the film industry today," writes Hiram Lee at the WSWS.

Online listening tip. Tom Ashbrook talks with Mark Harris (Pictures at a Revolution), Jeanine Basinger (The Star Machine) and Jack Beatty.

Update, 10/4: "He and I first met on my old daytime show, which he had discovered early and lent support to when people of his caliber didn't yet. He kept coming on through the years and was the ideal guest. He would be funny, Even silly. And, as easily, dead serious and even profound." And Dick Cavett's got video, too.

Posted by dwhudson at September 27, 2008 7:29 AM