“I was sure none of these people at the Actors Studio actually considered me an actor. I was a pretty boy, a real conventional kid who somehow had staggered into this mélange.” – Paul Newman, The Extraordinary Life Of An Ordinary Man
For Montgomery Clift, there was Howard Hawks’ Red River and Fred Zinnemann’s Oscar-winning The Search; for Marlon Brando, Zinnemann’s Oscar-nominated The Men and Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire; for James Dean, Kazan’s East Of Eden and Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without A Cause. Paul Newman, meanwhile, made his Hollywood debut in The Silver Chalice, a Biblical epic which was—and still is—widely thought to be a disaster. And the 29-year-old Newman is at the center of it, looking awkward, both about appearing in a thigh-baring tunic and playing a blue-eyed romantic hero.
There’s little in that performance, or in that choice of project, to hint at where Newman would go next: Oscar nominations in five different decades; sufficient box office appeal to command record-breaking salaries; top-billed stardom maintained more or less from the beginning of what would be a half-century-long career to its end. Altogether, these would make Newman one of the most successful products of the Method, and probably the greatest star to emerge from that post-war school of actors who broke and re-formed American stage and screen acting in the ’40s and beyond.
In his posthumously published 2022 memoir, The Extraordinary Life Of An Ordinary Man, Newman claims that he went after an acting career in part because it seemed to him a viable way out of his native Ohio, and away from the smalltown life which seemed to have so disappointed his emotionally disengaged father. After studying Drama at Yale, Newman in 1951 became a pupil of Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. The brightest lights of the era—Brando, Dean, Clift, Marilyn Monroe—passed through there, and it was there where Newman, he would later say, “learned everything” he was to know about acting.
All the same, Newman attributed much of his subsequent success to dumb luck. He knew how much his career benefited from his meeting a Western ideal of beauty in an industry that prized it. Newman somewhat resented his appearance, stemming back to a childhood in which he felt like a “decoration” to his mother, who Newman thought would have paid him no mind at all had he been “an ugly child.” Newman, who was half-Jewish on his father’s side, said of the looks that brought Hollywood calling: “It was my appearance that got me in the door. Where the hell would I have been if I looked like Golda Meir?”
Hollywood saw in Newman, early on at least, a physical resemblance to Brando, which no doubt made Newman even more attractive to filmmakers at a time when a Brando type could be a hot property. In 1953, Kazan wrote to screenwriter Budd Schulberg that Newman, whom Kazan was considering to play Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront, was “just as good looking as Brando,” though “not as good an actor yet…probably never will be.” But following the untimely death of James Dean, who had mocked The Silver Chalice to Newman’s face, Hollywood was suddenly short one photogenic Method leading man, and so Newman was hired for Somebody Up There Likes Me, cast in the role that was supposed to have been Dean’s.
Newman plays Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me like he’s the Brando of Streetcar, brutish and wild, which isn’t the easiest fit; where Brando was all pulverizing id as an actor, Newman took a more intellectual approach, and his Graziano performance can’t help but appear exaggeratedly mannered. Next, Newman more successfully tried on sulky, sensitive types in the Dean and Clift mold in the likes of The Long, Hot Summer and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, the latter earning Newman his first of nine acting Oscar nominations, before he settled on his own starmaking, Newman-brand antihero persona in popular hits including The Hustler and Cool Hand Luke. Newman’s specialty would be crooks and swindlers, who were often charismatic, occasionally buffoonish, and almost invariably cool.
In the 1960s, Newman became an icon of cinematic cool, matched in that department only by his box office rival Steve McQueen. And yet, all of Newman’s best characters were only ever superficially cool. Beneath the façade, there could be enormous complexity and feeling, in Newman’s seductive and self-defeating pool shark “Fast Eddie” Felson in The Hustler or his roguish but desperately lost convict in Cool Hand Luke. Audiences loved Newman because he could, through his style of underacting, make seemingly any character cool—even a complete bastard like Hud Bannon. But what made Newman’s characters compelling was the complicated, contradictory humanity that Newman was always playing under the hood.
Newman didn’t quite learn “everything” about acting at the Actors Studio; having arrived on screen a little premature, he developed more of a sense around what kind of actor he was by actually making films, in contrast to his Method generation peers who seemed to announce themselves on screen already fully formed. (This included Newman’s wife Joanne Woodward, a fellow Actors Studio alum who won the Best Actress Oscar for The Three Faces Of Eve, her third film, at just 28, and who Newman always considered to be the better actor.) Many of those to emerge as stars out of the Actors Studio were also personally troubled, the intensity of their talent seeming to go hand in hand with a tendency towards self-destruction.
In 1956, the year after Dean was killed in a car accident, Montgomery Clift had his matinee idol looks walloped in a car crash, and he subsequently began a “long suicide” by substance abuse which finally ended in his death in 1966. Clift’s The Misfits co-star Marilyn Monroe, meanwhile, met her early end from a barbiturate overdose in 1962.
Brando outlived all three by decades, but his demons manifested differently. The talent which seemed to come as easily to Brando as breathing was just as easily taken for granted by him, and he quickly grew disillusioned with acting. An actor who influenced screen acting maybe more than any individual ended up, during the second half of his career, making films only infrequently, and often just for the paycheck. Paul Newman had demons, too: Like his father and indeed many of the characters he played, Newman was a big drinker, though he miraculously maintained his marquee looks in spite of it. Rather than being sabotaged by his insecurities, Newman’s seemed to fuel him.
In 1963, Newman put out a newspaper ad pleading with home viewers not to watch a TV broadcast of The Silver Chalice, still haunted by his work in his debut at a time when he was experiencing new heights of fame and critical appreciation for Hud. When, in 1986, he accepted an Honorary Academy Award, Newman expressed “hope that my best work is down the pike in front of me.” Honorary Oscars often go to those whose careers are winding down or already wound up; the year after Newman received his award, he won the Best Actor Oscar—at age 62, and on his seventh nomination—for The Color Of Money, in which he reprises the role of Eddie Felson as an aging artist still hungry to prove himself.
The impression given by Newman was of an actor who was chronically dissatisfied and constantly driven to do better. Perhaps it was the urge to prove he was more than “decorative,” or maybe he was forever running from the prospect of that disappointing ordinary life back in Ohio, but Paul Newman endured as a star in a way that no other actor of his generation did, and in a way that few movie stars ever have. Newman kept his name above the title in Hollywood films for five decades because he kept seeking new projects which were, at their best, works of both commercial appeal and lasting quality, and as an actor he seemed to have a similarly tireless impulse. Over the course of his career, Newman gradually stripped away anything seemingly artificial from his performances, his instinct to keep pushing himself and do better having a lapidary effect on his acting.
Many of Newman’s best performances are found in the back half of his filmography, where the gestures and line deliveries become increasingly smaller, more rooted in plain and quiet truth. There’s his vainglorious Buffalo Bill in Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill And The Indians, his cynical lawyer Frank Galvin in Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict, the suddenly awakened Eddie Felson in The Color Of Money. Finally, you get to Newman’s last on-screen film role, as mob boss John Rooney in Road To Perdition. A career that started with a pretty, tunic-clad young man looking lost and uncomfortable ends with a lined, white-haired septuagenarian in absolute command of his performance, speaking in little more than a hoarse whisper and seeming to move hardly a muscle in his face while bringing to his scenes small earthquakes of emotion.