by Fiona Underhill, Staff Writer

We’re celebrating the centennial of Hollywood legend Paul Newman all week here at MovieJawn, as he was born on January 26, 1925. Across 55 feature films that spanned the entire second half of the twentieth century, Newman was revered for his beauty, but he never rested on the laurels of his looks. Newman knew that he didn’t have the natural gift for acting enjoyed by his wife Joanne Woodward, and that he would have to continue to work at his craft for his entire career. He didn’t find accessing his emotions easy–when acting, or in his real life relationships, including with his six children.

Paul Newman wasn’t just admired for his many successful and critically-acclaimed movies. He also had a car racing career, a salad dressing business that still generates millions of dollars for charity, was a civil rights and political activist, and had a Hollywood marriage that endured for 50 years. Newman could be a thorny interview subject, as he didn’t like discussing his craft and he didn’t allow the public much access to his private life, or who he was as a man. It wasn’t until Newman’s memoir was posthumously published in 2022 that his fans could comprehend the depth of his insecurities and how intensely self-critical he was.

Difficult father-son relationships were a running theme that pervaded Newman’s entire career including in some of his best movies, such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Hud, Sometimes a Great Notion, and Nobody’s Fool. And although he did feel a lot of pressure from his father in real life, his relationship with his mother was actually the more damaging one. She valued Newman’s looks above everything, and he was nothing but a prized ornament for her house. He describes himself as a “decorative little shit” who might come downstairs “looking especially pretty,” provoking a strong emotional reaction in his mother, but that “the child himself was not really seen.” It’s little wonder then, that once Newman reached stardom and people fawned over his famous blue eyes, he railed against this and rejected what he viewed as artificial emotions. At the end of his memoir, he heartrendingly describes himself as an “ornament and an orphan,” and an “observer of my own life” and there’s no doubt that this goes directly back to his mother.

In his late teens and his twenties, Newman frequently felt like a failure in a myriad of ways: academically, in the military (he survived WWII purely through what he referred to as Newman’s Luck), in his first marriage, and in the family business which his father was desperate for him to join. Newman says; “I wasn’t naturally anything...I measured things by what I wasn’t, not by anything I was.” Once Newman realized that the only thing that he liked doing was theater at college, he knew that he would have to study and work, and that this process would never stop. He joined the Actors Studio in New York, which he felt was full of “real actors...I was in their world but definitely not a part of it.” Newman confesses that when his acting was good, it was something he’d stumbled upon unintentionally; “when I mixed my confidence and energy with my real emotions–terror and fright (which came out as rage)–something genuine was going on, even if just by accident.” This could be why Newman’s angriest performance, as Hud Bannon, is arguably his best.

In Isaac Butler’s 2022 book on The Method, he says; “In 1963’s Hud, Newman was so sure of himself that he appeared hewn from stone. Instead of self-loathing, the power of his performance came from rage, and an utter disinterest in ingratiating himself to anyone, including the audience.” So many different factors drove Newman’s insecurities, and led him to strive to better himself and never get to a place of relaxation or satisfaction with his acting or career. He knew that many people thought that he owed his career to James Dean’s death, and he knew that his wife was “as good an actress as existed at the time,” and this became “a driving factor in his whole life,” in the words of his frequent director, Marty Ritt. Newman also knew that he suffered from something that he described as “emotional anesthesia” and felt that he was being asked at the Actors Studio to tap into a core of emotion that just wasn’t there, “so whatever I presented was artificial...I’m still not sure about what my core really is.”

Newman was certainly not a naturally gifted actor like Jimmy Dean or Marlon Brando. As another frequent director of Newman’s, Stuart Rosenberg, says; “He fights all the time...there’s an intensity that comes out. What makes Paul so terribly interesting as an actor is there is always this desperation to win that battle.” This is palpable in all of Newman’s early performances from the mid-50s, such as The Rack and Somebody Up There Likes Me, at least up until his late 60s laconic roles in Cool Hand Luke and Butch Cassidy. Newman didn’t think he achieved an ease in performing until 1982’s courtroom drama The Verdict, which is understandably one of his most-acclaimed performances; “I never had to ask myself to do anything in that picture, never had to call upon any reserves. It was always right there. It’s been a slow evolution. I started out as an emotional republican, and now I’m amazed at how available the emotion is.”

Newman being an “emotional republican” unfortunately extended to his relationship with his children, which led to him being plagued with guilt–particularly surrounding the death of his only son, Scott. In the 2022 Ethan Hawke documentary about Paul and Joanne, called The Last Movie Stars, Newman’s daughter Stephanie says; “Pop was a complicated guy. I’m not sure that I’ve ever met anybody that comes close to his personality. And I don’t how I can even define that. He was very preoccupied, especially when he was working.” Newman knew he was “detached and anesthetized” from his children, and had little sense of them as people. As he grew older, some of his roles give a sense of Newman trying to make amends with his children, such as Harry & Son (which he directed), and Nobody’s Fool – in which he plays a man bonding with his grandson after messing up his relationship with his son.

It would be easy for us outside observers to view Paul Newman as someone who “had it all” – the looks, the successful career and marriage – but it’s clear that on the inside, he was constantly beating himself up. It would have been easy for him to coast on his looks and his luck, and to have been satisfied with unchallenging roles. But Newman was never happy with his last film or his last part, and was always looking to do something different and better next time. And Newman’s extraordinary generosity later in life – giving away millions to charity – can be tracked back to feeling as if he hadn’t really earned his money or deserved his success, so needed to reject it. Newman knew he was lucky, but that didn’t stop him from relentlessly working at his craft, constantly striving to be better, and endlessly pursuing emotions that he would just have to conjure from nothing, if he had to. In Newman’s own words; “If I had to define Newman in the dictionary, I’d say: One who tries too hard.”

Sources:

“The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man. A Memoir” by Paul Newman, published 2022.

“The Method. How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act” by Isaac Butler, published 2022.

“The Last Movie Stars” HBO documentary directed by Ethan Hawke, released 2022.

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