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Published on Saturday, September 27, 2008 by The Guardian/UK

Paul Newman: A Life In film, Cars and Charity

The Hollywood actor, who died yesterday, was tuned to his craft but pursued happiness and giving outside movie sets

by Paul Harris

Paul Newman was no ordinary Hollywood legend, though he bore all the trappings of one. He had the movie star looks offset by his bright sparkling blue eyes. He had the enormous fortune, amassed over six decades at the top of his game. He had the Oscar, sitting on a shelf with many other awards.

[Paul Newman, known for his piercing blue eyes, boyish good looks and stellar performances in scores of hit Hollywood movies, is seen here in 2004. Newman has died, his foundation said. He was 83.]But Newman was always a man unto himself. He shunned the pitfalls and traps of being a legend. Not for Newman any high profile struggle with drugs or alcohol. Not for Newman, the fancy Beverly Hills castle. Not for Newman the sight of an ageing wonder dancing the night away with starlets a quarter of his age.

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.

The star of films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and The Colour of Money used his wealth and fame to indulge his other passions. He was a successful race car driver, once famously saying that the sport was the first thing he had ever shown grace at. He later became the owner of a race car team. He also created a food company, called Newman's Own, whose popular sauces and salad dressings sold in their millions, with all the profits going to charity. By the time he died, Newman's face stared out from America's supermarket shelves just as much as it had once done from its movie billboards.

An awareness of the richness of life outside Hollywood was the key to Newman's success and fame and it showed in his death. After a long struggle with cancer, he died at his home in Westport, Connecticut, a small town on America's east coast, many thousands of miles away from the Hollywood glamour that had made his career but never made his life. He was 83 years old.

Perhaps it was the grounded nature of his upbringing that gave him the strength to keep to his own road through Hollywood's many alluring diversions. He was born to the solid American middle class in 1925 in the rough and tumble city of Cleveland, Ohio. His Jewish father owned a sporting goods store and his mother, a Slovak catholic, raised the family at home.

Newman showed his first interest in acting as a child, performing as a jester in a school production of Robin Hood. But, like many of his generation, the second world war was destined to interrupt his adult life. His colour blindness kept him from being a pilot, but he trained as a radioman and gunner, flying from onboard America's giant aircraft gunners against the might of Japan. In one famous incident a fluke ear infection of his pilot kept him from flying on a mission in which the rest of his entire detail was later killed. It was an astonishing piece of fortune, but one not uncommon to the generation of men who fought in the war.

Like many others Newman came back from the conflict determined not to waste the rest of his life. He went to New York, studying acting and making his debut on Broadway. He also married his first wife, Jackie Witte, with whom he had a son and two daughters. Though that marriage was destined not to last, he always took a serious attitude towards relationships and brought up a large and loving family. He married a second time, to the actress Joanne Woodward, and spoke out in favour of monogamy, saying of infidelity: "Why go out for hamburger, when you have steak at home?". It was an attitude that is rarely found among Hollywood's elite.

But then neither were talents as rare as Newman's. He was an actors' actor, deeply tuned into his craft. The list of his acting triumphs is immense and spans different generations of Hollywood. He made huge popular epics like Butch Cassidy, The Towering Inferno, Hud, Harper and The Sting. He also made smaller, instant classics like Cool Hand Luke. He won his Oscar, after many nominations, for his second appearance as 'Fast' Eddie Felson in the Colour of Money, the sequel to the The Hustler.

But that was hardly the end for Newman. Often such an Oscar is given to cap a lifetime's achievement. But Newman went on to get nominated for a Tony for a Broadway revival of Our Town in 2003 and an Emmy nomination for a TV taping of the same production. His last big screen performance, as a mob boss in the Tom Hanks' film Road to Perdition, was suited to his talents. It was a sprawling story, a complex role and a huge box office and critical success.

But Newman's life was never all about his acting. During the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of his fane, he embraced Martin Luther King and the civil rights struggle. He went on sit-ins and marches. He became a vocal (and early) supporter of anti-Vietnam war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, helping kick start his campaign in New Hampshire. But his true lifelong passion seems to have been race cars and the world of driving.

After his official retirement from acting, he still managed to provide the voice for a character in the Pixar animation Cars and narrate a film about top Nascar driver Dale Earnhardt. He consumated his love for cars via the film Winning, where he played a driver. That experience inspired him to make his passion spill over from make-believe to real life. From the mid-70s right into the 90s he drove for a professional team, once competing in Le Mans. He also co-founded a successful race car team himself. At the age of 70 he became the oldest driver to compete as part of a winning team in a professional sanctioned race.

It was a remarkable achievement but one that seemed typical of a man who had always put a high value on things outside the fact of being a movie star. Newman had always seen his stunning looks as a strange sort of curse, deliberately going out of his way to pick difficult roles, to achieve success as an actor not just as a star. He also found celebrity puzzling and slightly scary (so, unsurprisingly, did his wife).

He was so pursued by female fans that he once took to wearing disguises, donning sunglasses and even beards so he could go out in public. It was a tactic that rarely worked. But in the end it did not matter. Newman succeeded in each aspect of his life: as an actor, as a driver and as a philanthropist. But most of all by simply living a life in full on his own terms. Perhaps it is fitting that his best known roles - in Butch Cassidy, Cool Hand Luke, The Hustler and the Sting - were as good-natured outlaws. They were rebels with a smile going their own way. Newman's Own may be the name of his charity food company, but it could also serve as a motto for his life.

 

© 2008 Guardian News and Media Limited

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