Oscar Actors: Newman, Paul–Background, Career, Awards (Cum Advantage, Emmy)

 

Paul Leonard Newman (January 26, 1925–September 26, 2008) was an American actor, film director, producer, race car driver, IndyCar owner, entrepreneur, and philanthropist.

He was the recipient of numerous awards, including an Oscar Award, a BAFTA Award, Screen Actors Guild Award, and Primetime Emmy Award.

Newman’s major film roles include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Exodus (1960), The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963), Harper (1966), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), and leading roles in The Sting (1973), Slap Shot (1977), and The Verdict (1982).

He had the voice role of Doc Hudson in the first installment of Disney-Pixar’s Cars as his final acting performance, with voice recordings being used again in Cars 3 (2017).

A ten-time Oscar nominee, Newman won the Best Actor Oscar for The Color of Money (1986).

He also received the Honorary Award, and  the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

Newman won several national championships as driver in Sports Car Club of America road racing, and his race teams won several championships in open-wheel IndyCar racing. He was a co-founder of Newman’s Own, a food company from which he donated all post-tax profits and royalties to charity.

As of November 2018, these donations have totaled over $535 million.

He was co-founder of Safe Water Network, a nonprofit that develops sustainable drinking water solutions for those in need.

In 1988, Newman founded the SeriousFun Children’s Network, a global family of summer camps and programs for children with serious illness which has served 290,076 children since its inception.

In 2006, Paul Newman also co-founded Safe Water Network with John Whitehead, former chairman of Goldman Sachs, and Josh Weston, former chairman of ADP, to improve access to safe water to underserved communities around the world. He was the husband of Oscar winning actress Joanne Woodward.

Newman was born January 26, 1925, in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the second son of Theresa Garth (née Fetzer, Fetzko, or Fetsko; Slovak: Terézia Fecková; (1894–1982) and Arthur Sigmund Newman Sr. (1893–1950), who ran sporting goods store.

Paul’s father was Jewish, the son of Simon Newman and Hannah Cohn, Hungarian-Jewish and Polish-Jewish emigrants from Hungary and Vistula Land. Paul’s mother was a practitioner of Christian Science. She was born to a Slovak Roman Catholic family in Peticse (near Homonna) in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (present-day Slovakia).

Newman described himself as a Jew, saying “it’s more of a challenge.” Newman’s mother worked in his father’s store, while raising Paul and his elder brother Arthur, who later became producer and production manager.

Newman showed early interest in the theater; his first role was at the age of 7, playing court jester in a school production of Robin Hood.

At age 10, Newman performed at the Cleveland Play House in a production of Saint George and the Dragon, and was a notable actor and alumnus of their Curtain Pullers children’s theatre program.

Graduating from Shaker Heights High School in 1943, he briefly attended Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, where he was initiated into the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity.

Newman served in the US Navy in WWII in the Pacific theater. Initially, he enrolled in the Navy V-12 pilot training program at Yale University, but was dropped when his colorblindness was discovered. Boot camp followed, with training as a radioman and rear gunner. Qualifying in torpedo bombers in 1944, Aviation Radioman Third Class Newman was sent to Barbers Point, Hawaii. He was subsequently assigned to Pacific-based replacement torpedo squadrons VT-98, VT-99, and VT-100, responsible primarily for training replacement combat pilots and air crewmen, with special emphasis on carrier landings.

He later flew as a turret gunner in an Avenger torpedo bomber. As a radioman-gunner, his unit was assigned to the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill along with other replacements shortly before the Battle of Okinawa in the spring of 1945. The pilot of his aircraft had an earache and was grounded as was his crew, including Newman. The rest of their squadron flew to the Bunker Hill. Days later, a kamikaze attack on the vessel killed a number of service members, including other members of his unit.

After the war, Newman completed his Bachelor of Arts degree in drama and economics at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio in 1949.

He joined summer stock companies, most notably the Belfry Players in Wisconsin and the Woodstock Players in Illinois. He toured with them for three months and developed his talents as a part of Woodstock Players.

He later attended the Yale School of Drama for one year, before moving to NYC to study under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Newman initially was hesitant to leave New York for Hollywood, and that Newman had said, “Too close to the cake. Also, no place to study.”

Newman arrived in New York City in 1951 with his first wife Jackie Witte, taking up residence in the St. George section of Staten Island.

He made his Broadway debut in the original production of William Inge’s Picnic with Kim Stanley in 1953, and appeared in the original Broadway production of The Desperate Hours in 1955.

In 1959, he was in the original Broadway production of Sweet Bird of Youth with Geraldine Page and 3 years later starred with Page in the film version.

TV

During this time, Newman started acting in television. His first credited role was in a 1952 episode of Tales of Tomorrow entitled “Ice from Space”. In the mid-1950s, he appeared twice on CBS’s Appointment with Adventure anthology series.

In February 1954, Newman appeared in screen test with James Dean, directed by Gjon Mili, for East of Eden (1955). Newman was tested for the role of Aron Trask, Dean for the role of Aron’s brother Cal. Dean won his part, but Newman lost out to Richard Davalos.

That same year, he co-starred with Eva Marie Saint and Frank Sinatra in a live—and color—TV broadcast of Our Town, a musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s stage play. Newman was a last-minute replacement for James Dean.

Newman replaced Dean after Dean’s death as a boxer in TV adaptation by A. E. Hotchner of a Hemingway story, “The Battler,” broadcast live on October 18, 1955, and directed by Arthur Penn.

That performance led to his breakthrough role as Rocky Graziano in the film Somebody Up There Likes Me in 1956.

Newman was cast in two leading roles originally earmarked for Dean, as Billy the Kid in The Left-Handed Gun and as Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me, both filmed after Dean’s death in an automobile collision.

Newman’s first film for Hollywood was The Silver Chalice (1954), a box-office failure, for which he had disdain.

In 1956, Newman attention and acclaim for the role of Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me. In 1958, he starred in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), opposite Elizabeth Taylor. The film was a box-office smash, and Newman garnered his first Oscar nomination. Also in 1958, Newman starred in The Long, Hot Summer with Joanne Woodward, with whom he reconnected on the set in 1957 (they had first met in 1953). He won Best Actor at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival for this film.

Major films
Newman starred in The Young Philadelphians (1959), a drama film which co-starred Barbara Rush, Robert Vaughn and Alexis Smith, and was directed by Vincent Sherman. The film was based on the 1956 novel, The Philadelphian, by Richard P. Powell.

He followed up with leads in Exodus (1960), From the Terrace, (1960), The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963), Torn Curtain (1966), Harper (1966), Hombre (1967), Cool Hand Luke (1967), The Towering Inferno (1974), Slap Shot (1977), Absence of Malice (1981) and The Verdict (1982).

He teamed up with fellow actor Robert Redford and director George Roy Hill for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973).

After his marriage to Woodward, they appeared together in The Long, Hot Summer (1958), Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys!, (1958), From the Terrace (1960), Paris Blues (1961), A New Kind of Love (1963), Winning (1969), WUSA (1970), playing Harper for 2nd time in The Drowning Pool (1975), Slap Shot (1977) Harry & Son (1984), and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990).

They starred in the HBO miniseries Empire Falls, but did not share any scenes.

Newman directed four features starring Woodward. They were Rachel, Rachel (1968), based on Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God, the screen version of the Pulitzer Prize–winning play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972), the television screen version of the Pulitzer Prize–winning play The Shadow Box (1980), and a screen version of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (1987).

Twenty-five years after The Hustler, Newman reprised his role of “Fast Eddie” Felson in Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986), for which he finally won the Best Actor Oscar at his eighth nomination.

Some deemed this to be a weak rinse of the original Felson role and the Oscar as an honorary tribute to a portfolio of Oscar-nominated roles that had not won at the time but were more deserving. In 1994 Newman played alongside Tim Robbins as the character “Sidney J. Mussburger” in the Coen Brothers comedy The Hudsucker Proxy.

In 2003, Newman appeared in a Broadway revival of Wilder’s Our Town, receiving his first Tony Award nomination for his performance. PBS and the cable network Showtime aired a taping of the production, and Newman was nominated for an Emmy Award[40] for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie.

Newman’s last movie role was as a conflicted mob boss in the 2002 film Road to Perdition opposite Tom Hanks, for which he was nominated for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

His last appearance overall, although he continued to provide voice work for films, was in 2005 in the HBO mini-series Empire Falls (based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Richard Russo) in which he played the dissolute father of the protagonist, Miles Roby, and for which he won a Primetime Emmy.

In 2006, in keeping with his strong interest in car racing, he provided the voice of Doc Hudson, a retired anthropomorphic race car, in Disney/Pixar’s Cars – this was his final role for a major feature film. While not in the second film Cars 2 (2011), his voice was later used in the third film, (which was done through archive recordings) Cars 3 (2017), for which he received billing, almost 9 years after his death.

Newman retired from acting in May 2007: “You start to lose your memory, you start to lose your confidence, you start to lose your invention. So I think that’s pretty much a closed book for me.” He came out of retirement to record narration for the 2007 documentary Dale, about the life of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt, and for the 2008 documentary The Meerkats.

With writer A. E. Hotchner, Newman founded Newman’s Own, a line of food products, in 1982. The brand started with salad dressing and has expanded to include pasta sauce, lemonade, popcorn, salsa, and wine, among other things. Newman established a policy that all proceeds, after taxes, would be donated to charity. He co-wrote a memoir about the subject with Hotchner, Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good. Among other awards, Newman’s Own co-sponsors the PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award, a $25,000 reward designed to recognize those who protect the First Amendment as it applies to the written word.

One beneficiary of his philanthropy is the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, a residential summer camp for seriously ill children located in Ashford, Connecticut, which Newman co-founded in 1988. It is named after the gang in his film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), and the real-life, historic Hole-in-the-Wall outlaw hangout in the mountains of northern Wyoming. Newman’s college fraternity, Phi Kappa Tau, adopted his Connecticut Hole in the Wall camp as their “national philanthropy” in 1995. The original camp has expanded to become several Hole in the Wall Camps in the U.S., Ireland, France, and Israel.

In 1983, Newman became a Major Donor for The Mirror Theater Ltd, alongside Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino, matching a grant from Laurence Rockefeller. Newman was inspired to invest by his connection with Lee Strasberg, as Lee’s then daughter-in-law Sabra Jones was the Founder and Producing Artistic Director of The Mirror. Newman remained a friend of the company until his death and discussed at numerous times possible productions in which he could star with his wife, Joanne Woodward.

In June 1999, Newman donated $250,000 to Catholic Relief Services to aid refugees in Kosovo.

On June 1, 2007, Kenyon College announced that Newman had donated $10 million to the school to establish a scholarship fund as part of the college’s $230 million fund-raising campaign. Newman and Woodward were honorary co-chairs of a previous campaign.

Newman was one of the founders of the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP). Newman was named the Most Generous Celebrity of 2008 by Givingback.org. He contributed $20,857,000 for the year of 2008 to the Newman’s Own Foundation, which distributes funds to a variety of charities.

Newman was responsible for preserving lands around Westport, Connecticut. He lobbied the state’s governor for funds for the 2011 Aspetuck Land Trust in Easton. In 2011 Paul Newman’s estate gifted land to Westport to be managed by the Aspetuck Land Trust.

Political activism

Newman was a lifelong Democrat. For his support of Eugene McCarthy in 1968 (and effective use of television commercials in California) and his opposition to the Vietnam War, Newman was placed nineteenth on Richard Nixon’s enemies list, which Newman claimed was his greatest accomplishment. During the 1968 general election, Newman supported Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey and appeared in a pre-election night telethon for him.  He was also described as a “vocal supporter” of gay rights and same-sex marriage.

In January 1995, Newman was chief investor of a group, including the writer E.L. Doctorow and the editor Victor Navasky, that bought the progressive-left wing periodical The Nation. Newman was an occasional writer for the publication.

Newman attended the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, and was also present at the first Earth Day event in Manhattan on April 22, 1970.

Newman’s racing life was chronicled in the documentary Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman (2015).

Newman was married twice. His first marriage was to Jackie Witte from 1949 to 1958. They had a son, Scott (1950–1978), and two daughters, Susan (born 1953) and Stephanie Kendall (born 1954). Scott, who appeared in Breakheart Pass, The Towering Inferno, and the 1977 film Fraternity Row, died in November 1978 from drug overdose. Newman started the Scott Newman Center for drug abuse prevention in memory of his son.

Susan is a documentary filmmaker and philanthropist, and has Broadway and screen credits, including a starring role as one of four Beatles fans in I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), and also a small role opposite her father in Slap Shot. She also received an Emmy nomination as co-producer of his telefilm, The Shadow Box.

Newman met actress Joanne Woodward in 1953, on the production of Picnic on Broadway. It was Newman’s debut; Woodward was an understudy. Shortly after filming The Long, Hot Summer in 1957, he divorced Witte to marry Woodward. They married early in 1958. The Newmans moved to 11th Street in Manhattan, before buying home and starting a family in Westport, Connecticut. They were one of the first Hollywood movie star couples to choose to raise their families outside California. They remained married for 50 years until his death in 2008.

They had three daughters: Elinor “Nell” Teresa (b. 1959), Melissa “Lissy” Stewart (b. 1961), and Claire “Clea” Olivia (b. 1965). Newman was well known for his devotion to wife and family. Asked about his reputation for fidelity, he famously quipped, “Why go out for a hamburger when you have steak at home?” In his profile on 60 Minutes, he admitted he once left Woodward after a fight, walked around outside the house, knocked on the front door and explained to Joanne he had nowhere to go.

Newman directed Nell alongside her mother in the films Rachel, Rachel and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. Newman and Woodward also acted as mentors to Allison Janney. They met her while she was freshman at Kenyon College during a play which Newman was directing.

Gossip: Newman had an affair in the late 1960s with actress Nancy Bacon.

Newman was scheduled to make professional directing debut with the Westport Country Playhouse’s 2008 production of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, but he stepped down citing health concerns.

He had been diagnosed with lung cancer–he was  heavy smoker until he quit in 1986.

Newman died on September 26, 2008, in the company of his family. He was 83.