 
Mamma Mia! It’s Monica’s birthday and Eric Stoltz. |
Paul Newman: ‘A pretty boy actor, but a hell of a good one’, says film critic Barry Norman . |
| With Paul Newman gone maybe only Clint Eastwood, five years his junior, is left of a generation of movie stars who defied the years to become and remain icons of the cinema screen.You don’t have to be much of an actor to become a film star – looks and personality often do it for you — but you have to be a very good one to remain a star and Newman was an extremely fine actor. Ironically, though, it was his looks, those chiselled cheekbones, those startlingly blue eyes, that initially held him back. Even after a remarkably good performance as the boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me, his breakthrough movie, people tended to write him off as just a pretty boy. Lee Strasberg, who trained him at the Actors Studio, once said that he could have been as great an actor as Marlon Brando if he had not ‘relied too heavily on his looks and coasted through roles’. But Strasberg was wrong. Newman might not have been as good as Brando (who is?) but as he said himself: ‘I may have looked And so he was. In his day he was an even bigger sex symbol than Cruise, Pitt, Depp or any of the present lot, but in his best films – such as The Hustler, Hud and Cool Hand Luke – there is one He’s probably mostly remembered as Butch Cassidy and the lovable conman in The Sting, but a lot of his best performances were in far more complex roles – a cynical chancer in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, a rapist in The Outrage, a bandit turned lawman in The Life And Times Of Judge Roy Bean and, his last significant role, the gangster boss in Road To Perdition. His peers, his fellow actors, recognised his gifts and nominated him ten times for Oscars but he won only once, for The Color Of Money, an award which he maybe didn’t deserve. I believe the Oscar voters gave this one to Newman out of a sense of guilt, a belated recognition that they had overlooked him far too often and that, since he was already 61, they might not get another chance. Well, at least he won the Oscar, not that he would have bothered too much if he hadn’t. He didn’t even turn up that night when, finally, they gave him the award. Newman never took himself too seriously. In later life he even urged people to catch reruns of himself in one of his earliest movies, The Silver Chalice, in which, as a beskirted Greek slave, he gave a performance that he cheerfully acknowledged to be quite appalling. But by then he must have known how good he really was, that he had the ability granted to very few movie stars to become completely the character he was playing while retaining the attractive, charismatic persona of Paul Newman. I met him many years ago when he was a young actor. I remember he was utterly charming but his eyes were slightly less blue than they appeared on screen. I once asked Joanne Woodward, his wife of 50 years, how he retained his enviable looks. She said he would plunge his face into cold water |
| Tribute to Paul Newman, one of my all time favourite actors and the star of the first movie I ever saw in a cinema, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. |
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Tag: “They came for a holiday…now Plot: When a suburban couple go camping This amazing film is available from SynapseFilms with loads of extra features. It is currently available from any reputable DVD seller or online e-tailer! You want the trivia? Here it is:
And here’s the 2009 version trailer. |
