Entertainment Weekly Pays Tribute to Paul Newman, Too!
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Another extraordinary cover honoring Paul Newman.
This one follows People Magazine’s cover from earlier this week.
It’s simple, features a striking photo and is a keeper.
For a summary of this week’s issue, make the jump!
He made his movie debut wearing a miniskirt-style toga in a religious epic. He left the screen 52 years later with a farewell voice-over performance in the blockbuster Pixar cartoon Cars. So it’s impossible to say that the passing of Paul Newman—who died of cancer at age 83 on Sept. 26 at his home in Westport, Conn.—marks the end of an era, since the era in which Paul Newman was a first-tier movie star spanned nearly half the history of movies. In this week’s Entertainment Weekly, we remember a legend and a life.
Newman emerged as a star in the aftermath of Marlon Brando’s seismic performances in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, which may be why he always seemed to be underrated—at least as underrated as a 10-time Oscar nominee could be (he received nine nods for acting and one for producing). Newman won just once, for The Color of Money, and took home two honorary Academy Awards, one for his contribution to film and one for the hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable contributions generated by sales of the popcorn and salad dressing to which he lent his name, his face, and his witty understanding that he could do good by turning himself into a commodity for his own purposes, not just Hollywood’s.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, Newman, a constant worker who made over 60 movies, seemed to become bored with acting, disaffected by his own stardom. (“He was tight and embarrassed and very angry about the way he looked, really,” said Martin Ritt, his most frequent director.) He tossed off a series of dull, detached performances; he dabbled in directing. He fell in love with auto racing. He immersed himself in progressive politics, and eventually won himself a spot on Richard Nixon’s enemies list that he cited as one of his greatest achievements. Even as late as 2006, the buzz was that Democrats in his adopted home state of Connecticut were talking Newman up seriously as a possible opponent to Joseph Lieberman in the senatorial primary.
And then, after the death of his only son, Scott, from an accidental drug and alcohol overdose in 1978, something happened to Newman. “I don’t think I’ll ever escape the guilt,” he said later—and he didn’t try. Instead, in his mid-50s, Newman reengaged himself in his work and his life. Over the years, he became closer to his daughters. He founded the Scott Newman Center for drug- abuse prevention; Newman’s Own, his nonprofit line of popcorn and salad dressings; and the Hole in the Wall Camps for kids with serious illnesses, beginning an engagement with charity work that would continue for the rest of his life and yield an astonishing $250 million in charitable giving. “He put together his own conscience with his fame,” recalls Shirley MacLaine, who costarred with Newman in the 1964 comedy What a Way to Go!
On screen, he dug deeper than he ever had before, giving a series of raw, wrenching, emotionally specific performances—in Fort Apache, the Bronx, Absence of Malice, The Verdict, and The Color of Money (the film that finally won him an acting Academy Award, on his seventh try). In the process, he cemented his status not as an icon of American beauty and masculinity on screen, but as an actor who was interested in the frailty, flaws, and humanity of every character he portrayed. “All that time, under that gorgeousness was this major actor waiting to get out,” said Verdict director Sidney Lumet this year. “He was getting on, and, as always, an actor has a choice about how much of himself he’s going to reveal.”
What Paul Newman leaves behind is not as simple as the twinkle in his eye and defiant charm he lent to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Sting; it’s the slump in his shoulders and trembling terror of the worn-out drunk in The Verdict, the rageful, cut-off loneliness at the core of Hud, the prim emotional constriction of Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, the wry half-defeated midlife madness of the hockey coach in Slap Shot. In his final big-screen appearance, in 2002’s Road to Perdition, Newman took on one of the least sympathetic roles of his career, a quietly murderous Irish Mob boss, and created a small, perfect essay on emotional compartmentalization. The performance was, if such a thing can be said, typical Paul Newman. He was every inch the movie star he had always been, and also the great actor that he never quite realized he had become.Ed Harris, who appeared with him in the 2005 HBO drama Empire Falls. “His humanity always shone through.” (Cover story, page 22) “One of the things that I love about Paul’s work was that he always had a sense of humor about what he was doing no matter how dark it was,” says
Newman’s Best: A Filmography: http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20205803,00.html. It’s EW’s cool-handed guide to 30 of the actor’s most memorable screen achievements over 50 years. (Feature, page 32)
HOLLYWOOD REMEMBERS PAUL NEWMAN
The verdict on Paul Newman is in: Hollywood’s elite remark on a life well lived.
ROBERT REDFORD, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; The Sting
“There is a point where feelings go beyond words. I have lost a real friend. My life—and this country—is better for his being in it.”
ELIZABETH TAYLOR, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“I loved that man with all my heart. He was goodness and kindness and pure integrity.”
MARTIN SCORSESE, The Color of Money
“The history of movies without Paul Newman? It’s unthinkable. His presence, his beauty, his physical eloquence, the emotional complexity he could conjure up and transmit through his acting in so many movies—where would we be without him?”
SUSAN SARANDON, Twilight
“He was something you don’t hear mentioned often these days: a good man. He taught me to appreciate the homegrown tomato, championship badminton, and chamber music.”
JOHN CUSACK, Fat Man and Little Boy
“I made ‘Fat Man and Little Boy’ with him in Mexico for about five months. And I became friendly with him. I would send him my films and he would say he screened them with a big bag of popcorn and he’d send me letters telling me what he thought. I never told him, but I pretty much framed every one.”
GEORGE KENNEDY, Cool Hand Luke
“In any picture he was in, Paul was the best thing in it. He worked at it harder than anybody. He was good at it. He was devoted to it. He was a wonderful actor and a pretty damned decent fellow.”
RICHARD THOMAS, Winning
“‘Winning’ was the first picture I ever made. I had my 17th birthday on set. Paul represented a side of the masculine psyche that was a little foreign to me: sports and the beautiful machismo that he had, which wasn’t swagger, but was always very modest and very authentic. Here I am, this kid from New York raised by ballet dancers. And Paul Newman is a real man, you know?”
JOHN LASSETER, Cars
“Paul Newman inspired his character of Doc Hudson more than any other actor I’ve worked with.… He would not really engage in too much conversation about acting, but if you wanted to talk about cars and car racing, he would sit and talk with you for hours.”
ED ASNER, Fort Apache, the Bronx
“One thing I remember when we were rehearsing: We’re walking together, and here he is in New York with his spiked-up blond hair, the shades, the red checkered mackinaw, and he tried to pass as Mr. Average Joe, expecting that nobody would think twice of looking at him. I thought it was the funniest goddamn thing in the world.”
