Paul Newman si sarebbe affermato con alcuni ruoli come quello di Rocky Graziano in Lassù qualcuno mi ama (Robert Wise, 1956), quello del protagonista in Furia Selvaggia: Billy Kid, il Ben Quick di La lunga estate calda (Martin Ritt, 1958), Lo spaccone (Robert Rossen, 1961): tutti personaggi di ribelli proletari, gente molto diversa dall'attore che li avrebbe interpretati. Paul nasce infatti (il 26 gennaio del 1925) in una famiglia agiata che viveva a Shaker Heights, nell'Ohio, un elegante zona residenziale vicino Cleveland. II padre è il proprietario di un negozio di articoli sportivi (il più grande del paese) e il giovane figlio riceve una buona educazione pur mostrando una certa propensione alle discipline sportive. Si dedica alla recitazione per caso: escluso dalla squadra di football (per punizione: era stato coinvolto in una rissa), decide di impiegare il tempo libero entrando in una compagnia teatrale con la quale farà parecchi spettacoli. La sua carriera d'attore rischia di interrompersi quando il padre muore e il ragazzo si occupa per due anni di gestire il negozio. Ma evidentemente non è quello che vuole: torna dunque alla recitazione e, come avrà modo di dichiarare, fu "molto, molto fortunato". Dopo alcuni lavori fra teatro e televisione, nel 1953 ha un grosso successo in Picnic, una produzione di Broadway che gli vale un contratto con la Warner. Il primo film che gli affida lo studio rischia di chiudere per sempre le porte del cinema all'attore: si tratta di un polpettone e psico-religioso intitolato Il calice d'argento (Victor Saville, 1954). Newman torna a Broadway per ottenere un grande successo con Ore disperate, un ruolo che gli procura in seguito la chiamata per interpretare il pugile Graziano in Lassù qualcuno mi ama, il film che lo consacrerà davvero come divo. Per alcuni anni sarà spesso messo a confronto con Marlon Brando e James Dean, ma con il passare dei tempo Newman si affermerà come star di prima grandezza, interprete sensibile e versatile, uomo di cinema a trecentosessanta gradi (passa infatti alla regia alla fine degli anni sessanta e produce diverse pellicole).

Incantevoli occhi celesti, sorriso audace, sguardo intenso e un po' tormentato. Paul Newman non era "soltanto" un'icona del cinema e uno dei più popolari sex-symbol di tutti i tempi, ma anche un attore di enorme talento, capace di esprimere alla perfezione il malessere, le debolezze e la voglia di riscatto dei propri personaggi. Le sue più grandi interpretazioni restano quelle di "duri" dal cuore tenero, uomini che dietro una sfrontata spavalderia tentano di nascondere un'inconfessata fragilità: da Brick Pollitt, atleta alcolizzato e marito impotente di Liz Taylor ne La gatta sul tetto che scotta, a Eddie Felson, campione di biliardo vittima della propria ambizione ne Lo spaccone; dal gigolò che si adagia in una vita da mantenuto ne La dolce ala della giovinezza al playboy cinico e prepotente di Hud il selvaggio.
Ma Paul Newman è stato anche il leggendario Butch Cassidy, ironico fuorilegge in un Far West al tramonto, ed Henry Gondorff, la simpatica canaglia intenta ad architettare con il socio Robert Redford una divertentissima "stangata". Il suo piglio ribelle, simile a quello di altri due miti appartenenti alla stessa generazione (Marlon Brando e James Dean), con il passare degli anni si era stemperato in uno sguardo bagnato di malinconia, in cui l'azzurro profondissimo degli occhi sembrava quasi evocare il rimpianto per una bellezza ormai avviata al crepuscolo.

Paul Leonard Newman nasce il 26 gennaio 1925 a Shaker Heights, una cittadina dell'Ohio. Dopo aver rinunciato alle sue aspirazioni come pilota, decide di voler fare l'attore e si trasferisce a New York, dove si iscrive all'Actor's Studio. Il debutto a Broadway avviene nel 1953 in Pic-nic, e il cinema non tarda ad accorgersi di lui: dopo un mediocre esordio con Il calice d'argento (1954), nel 1956 Newman interpreta Lassù qualcuno mi ama di Robert Wise, nei panni di un giovane e ardimentoso pugile; il successo è immediato, e in breve tempo l'attore si ritrova nel novero delle grandi star di Hollywood.
Il 1958 è l'anno della definitiva consacrazione, grazie al western Furia selvaggia di Arthur Penn ma soprattutto a La gatta sul tetto che scotta di Richard Brooks, fortunatissimo adattamento cinematografico del dramma di Tennessee Williams, con Newman nel ruolo di un atleta alcolizzato sposato con l'affascinante Elizabeth Taylor. Nel frattempo sposa in seconde nozze l'attrice Joanne Woodward, con la quale nel frattempo recita ne La lunga estate calda e Missili in giardino; il matrimonio fra Newman e la Woodward dura per ben cinquant'anni, fino alla scomparsa dell'attore, e resta una delle unioni più durature nella storia di Hollywood.
Intanto, la carriera di Paul Newman prosegue con I segreti di Filadelfia (1959), Dalla terrazza (1960) ed Exodus di Otto Preminger (1960), dramma storico sulla nascita dello Stato di Israele. Nel 1961, accanto a Piper Laurie, l'attore dà vita a uno dei suoi personaggi più memorabili: quello di Eddie Felson, sfrontato campione di biliardo destinato ad un amaro fallimento nel film Lo spaccone, diretto da Robert Rossen. L'anno seguente, interpreta il bellimbusto che si fa mantenere dalla matura diva Geraldine Page ne La dolce ala della giovinezza di Richard Brooks.
Nel 1963, Paul Newman è protagonista del thriller Intrigo a Stoccolma di Mark Robson e del dramma Hud il selvaggio di Martin Ritt, nella parte del figlio ribelle di un allevatore texano, al fianco di Patricia Neal e Melvyn Douglas. Nel 1966, invece, recita in due fortunati gialli: Detective's story, nel ruolo dell'investigatore Harper, e Il sipario strappato, con Julie Andrews, per la regia di Alfred Hitchcock. L'anno seguente regala un'altra prova magistrale nel film Nick Mano Fredda di Stuart Rosenberg, interpretando un carcerato che tenta disperatamente di evadere dalla prigione.
Nel 1968 debutta dietro la macchina da presa con La prima volta di Jennifer, ritratto al femminile di un'insegnante repressa in cui l'attore dirige sua moglie Joanne Woodward; la pellicola è accolta dal consenso unanime dei critici e gli vale il Golden Globe come miglior regista e la nomination all'Oscar per il miglior film. In seguito, Newman dirigerà anche altre pellicole, fra cui Sfida senza paura (1971).
Nel 1969, Paul Newman è protagonista insieme a Robert Redford del celeberrimo Butch Cassidy di George Roy Hill, in cui dà vita al personaggio del titolo: un bandito che, insieme al suo compare Sundance Kid, svaligia i treni dell'Union Pacific. Butch Cassidy ha un enorme successo e diventa un classico della New Hollywood, mentre il sodalizio fra Newman e Redford sarà rinnovato nel 1973 con la commedia La stangata, storia dell'ingegnosa truffa organizzata da due vivaci imbroglioni nel famosissimo film di George Roy Hill.
Negli anni '70, dopo essere stato diretto da John Huston ne L'uomo dai sette capestri (1972) e L'agente speciale Mackintosh (1973), recita nel film catastrofico campione d'incassi L'inferno di cristallo di John Guillermin e Irwin Allen (1974), in mezzo a un cast di superstar che include nomi del calibro di Steve McQueen e Faye Dunaway. Nel 1976, invece, è un inedito Buffalo Bill nel dissacrante Buffalo Bill e gli indiani, firmato da Robert Altman.
Nel corso degli anni '80, Paul Newman si conferma interprete di primissimo piano grazie a titoli quali Diritto di cronaca di Sydney Pollack (1981), in cui viene messo sotto accusa dalla reporter Sally Field, e Il verdetto di Sidney Lumet (1982), un magnifico dramma giudiziario in cui Newman regala l'indelebile ritratto di un avvocato alcolizzato e alla deriva. Nel 1986 torna a vestire i panni dell'asso del biliardo Eddie Felson, questa volta accanto a un giovane Tom Cruise, ne Il colore dei soldi di Martin Scorsese, per il quale si aggiudica finalmente il premio Oscar come miglior attore, appena un anno dopo aver ricevuto l'Oscar alla carriera.
Nel 1990, Newman recita accanto alla moglie nell'apprezzato Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, diretto da James Ivory, mentre nel 1994 è alle prese con un personaggio crepuscolare nel melodramma La vita a modo mio di Robert Benton. La sua definitiva apparizione sul grande schermo risale del 2002, quando Newman si congeda dal mondo del cinema con una grandiosa interpretazione nei panni di un anziano boss del crimine nel film drammatico Era mio padre di Sam Mendes. Il suo ultimo impegno come attore è però nel cast corale della miniserie televisiva Empire falls (2005), ancora una volta (l'ultima) insieme alla Woodward, prima del ritiro dalle scene.
In oltre mezzo secolo di carriera, Paul Newman ha guadagnato una quantità impressionante di riconoscimenti: oltre all'Oscar per Il colore dei soldi, ha vinto un Oscar alla carriera nel 1986 ed ha ottenuto dieci nomination (nove come attore e una come produttore). Fra gli altri trofei conquistati: un premio a Cannes per La lunga estate calda, un Orso d'Argento a Berlino per La vita a modo mio e tre Golden Globe (di cui uno alla carriera nel 1984).
Oltre che per il cinema, Paul Newman era noto anche per la sua passione per le corse automobilistiche (lui stesso è stato un formidabile pilota). Molto impegnato sul fronte della lotta per i diritti civili e in numerose cause di beneficenza, era da sempre un attivo sostenitore del Partito Democratico, ed era intervenuto spesso nelle campagne elettorali di vari candidati. Sposatosi due volte, Newman ha avuto in tutto sei film, un maschio e cinque femmine; il suo primogenito, Scott, è morto di overdose nel 1978, a soli 28 anni. In ricordo del figlio, l'attore aveva fondato lo Scott Newman Center, un centro per la prevenzione contro la tossicodipendenza.

Divo non basta, personaggio non basta, esempio non basta, e neppure eroe descrive compiutamente Paul Newman. Occorrono tutte quelle definizioni, insieme. Paul si rivelò verso la metà degli anni cinquanta, un momento favorevole per immettersi e dare indicazioni diverse. Aveva trent'anni, era conscio del proprio appeal sul quale lavorare, per cominciare; adesso si trattava di mettere a fuoco le ambizioni, di perfezionare la propria attitudine, di non fare errori. Una decina di anni prima era su una portaerei al largo del Giappone poco prima di Hiroshima. Insomma prese contatto con la guerra. E tornato a casa, entrando nell'Actor's Studio a New York, capì che molto era cambiato, era cambiata l'America e dunque il mondo. Soprattutto, e questo lo interessava da vicino, sarebbe cambiato il cinema. I reduci come lui erano stati testimoni, in Paesi lontani e diversi, di realtà devastanti e sconosciute, che adesso erano conosciute. I film tutti col lieto fine sarebbero stati imbarazzanti. L'eroe assoluto Gary Cooper, marito e padre perfetto, era sorpassato. Ce ne voleva uno nuovo. E il novo eroe fu Paul Newman, attento alla realtà, ai diritti e anche al dolore, al sociale e all'evoluzione generale. Evoluzione significava dunque "ribellione". I suoi compagni del gruppo fondatore dell'Actor's Studio furono tutti ribelli, bastano i nomi: Brando, Dean, Clift. Lui sarebbe stato il più longevo, forse il più intelligente. Aveva talento, ma non quello di un Brando, all'inizio esagerava con la maniera, nel tempo supplì con l'applicazione. Era bellissimo ma cercò sempre di non darlo a vedere. In Lassù qualcuno mi ama ha la faccia devastata del pugile Graziano, nello Spaccone (sono i due titoli che ne fecero un divo) lo picchiano e gli fratturano le mani. Nella Dolce ala della giovinezza gli fracassano il naso con un bastone. Era quasi sempre così. In Nick manofredda, dove fa il detenuto, George Kennedy lo massacra senza pietà, ma lui non cede, si rialza continuamente, maschera di sangue, ma non cede.

Ribelle. Contestò tutti, dai genitori al "padrone", era intollerante alle imposizioni e a tutte le autorità, anche quella trascendente. Sempre in "manofredda" se la prende con quello lassù: "sono qui a invocarti, ma parlo al nulla." Ma Newman poteva essere arrabbiato, ma non ateo, così, alla fine rivede il concetto: "signore, forse le carte me le hai date, ma le ho giocate male."
La famiglia. Negli anni d'oro, i Sessanta, quelli vitali, della consacrazione, non è mai stato padre, se era marito era divorziato con problemi enormi di rapporto con l'ex. In Detectiv's Story a latere della sua indagine, delude ancora una volta la moglie (che ha già chiesto il divorzio), sa di essersi giocato l'ultima possibilità con lei, ma va avanti "devo concludere il mio lavoro" che significa denunciare il suo migliore amico che ha commesso un delitto. "Quando ci siamo conosciuti - gli dice- eri candidato a governatore della California. E' normale per un aspirante governatore assassinare la gente?" Quando l'altro gli punta la pistola per fermarlo, gli dice "puoi spararmi, per come mi sento adesso non sarebbe la cosa peggiore...".
Così alla fine del film Paul, con fatica e dolore, e con rigore, tornava l'eroe nascosto. Ritrovava una morale credibile, non sovrumana. Quasi sempre nei film aveva maltrattato tutti ma finiva per rispettare tutti. Visto che il suo privato Sempre nei film) era disastroso, tanto valeva essere utile agli altri. E dunque valeva l'attenzione ai deboli, agli indifesi e ai diversi e l'applicazione relativa. Era un liberal, nei film e nella vita. Si schierava col candidato democratico, la sua firma era sempre fra le prime nei cartelli dei diritti civili e dei diritti alla pace.
Nei decenni seppe adeguare i ruoli all'età. Minore azione, minore rabbia, ma sempre applicazione assoluta e spinta ideale, seppure nascosta. Mentre avanzavano altri personaggi. Nella generazione successiva forse prevale De Niro, talentuoso, ambiguo, febbrile, ma eroe no, e poi sta invecchiando troppo male. Il "contemporaneo" Clooney, è bello e intelligente, impegnato e trasgressivo il giusto, ma anche lui senza eroismo. Oggi i giovani eleggono, quasi all' unanimità, Johnny Depp, forse più duttile di Newman, collocabile ovunque, anche in abiti femminili che Paul non sarebbe proprio riuscito a indossare.
Chi era nell'età vulnerabile, come chi scrive, quando Newman era modello ostico e difficile ma esempio irresistibile, non può non averlo amato con tutto il cuore. Assumevi la sua energia e il suo incanto, le sue azioni erano le tue. Prendevi i suoi pugni, seducevi le donne con lui, eri al suo fianco quando faceva Harper e guidava la Porsche. Impugnavi stecca da biliardo con lui. Qualcosa di più dell'identificazione.
Con lui eri in buone mani. Le sue indicazioni erano quelle dell'eroe ma dalle misure giuste, trasgressivo senza spinelli.
Adesso che non è più qui non puoi far finta di niente. La sua presenza sullo schermo poteva diventare presenza fisica che ti stava al fianco. Come un amico.

A young, dewy Paul Newman made his unlikely movie debut in this 1954 biblical epic, filmed in color and wide screen by Victor Saville. Clad in a toga, Newman seems to be struggling to forget his Actors Studio training. His role, as a Greek slave commissioned by an early Christian patriarch to fashion a chalice worthy of containing the silver cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper, never moves much beyond the standard biblical beefcake of the period — as forever exemplified by Victor Mature in Cecil B. DeMille’s “Samson and Delilah.”

Earnest as he is, Newman is easily upstaged by Jack Palance, offering one of his maddest performances as Simon the Magician, a wily trickster with satanic facial hair whose job it is in this first century A.D. to produce some miracles spectacular enough to make ’em forget Jesus. Blond, strapping Virginia Mayo, top billed, is Palance’s partner, a courtesan with Midwestern vowels who also holds Newman’s heart in her hands from their days as children together (during which she is played by Natalie Wood). Her good-girl rival is the tiny, birdlike Pier Angeli, portraying a Christian with hopes of bringing the silversmith around, a transformation accomplished with the help of an appearance by a very special guest.
As a director Saville demonstrates little personal commitment to the material. (His previous film was a Mickey Spillane adaptation.) But “The Silver Chalice” is distinguished by a daring use of stylized, theatrical sets, executed in a stripped-down midcentury-modern style that suggests a Jerusalem designed by Philip Johnson. Newman had to wait two years for his next shot, when he replaced the deceased James Dean in the Rocky Graziano biopic “Somebody Up There Likes Me” (Angeli was again his leading lady), at which point his career really took off.
“The Silver Chalice” is one of five titles Warner Home Video is releasing as “The Paul Newman Film Series.” The others are “The Helen Morgan Story” (Michael Curtiz, 1957), “The Outrage” (Martin Ritt, 1964), “When Time Ran Out” (James Goldstone, 1980) and the 1968 film that was Newman’s first and probably best job of directing, “Rachel, Rachel,” starring Joanne Woodward. (Warner Home Video, $19.97, not rated)
Da The New York Times, 15 febbraio 2009

Paul Newman always wore his fame lightly, his beauty too. The beauty may have been more difficult to navigate, when he was young in the 1950's and still being called the next Marlon Brando, establishing his bona fides at the Actors Studio and on Broadway.
Yet Mr. Newman, who died at his home in Westport, Conn., on Friday, never seemed to resent his good looks, as some men did; instead, he shrugged them off without letting them go. He learned to use that flawless face, so we could see the complexities underneath. And later, when age had extracted its price, he learned to use time too, showing us how beauty could be beaten down and nearly used up.
You see the dangerous side of his beauty in “Hud,” Martin Ritt's irresistible if disingenuous 1963 drama about a Texas ranching family in which Mr. Newman plays the womanizing son of a cattleman (the Hollywood veteran Melvyn Douglas), who's hanging onto a fast-fading way of life. The movie traffics in piety: the father refuses to dig for the oil that might change the family's fortunes because he doesn't approve of sucking the land dry. Mr. Newman plays the son, Hud, and it's his job to sneer at the old man's naïveté and to play the villain, which he does so persuasively that he ends up being the film's most enduring strength.
A lot of reviewers clucked about Hud and Mr. Newman's grasping bad-boy ways (the word they used then was materialism), but the camera loves this cowboy Lothario so much — or, rather, the actor playing him — that his father's high-and-mighty ways don't stand a chance. Nobody else much does, either: when Hud hits on the family housekeeper (a smoky-voiced, smoking Patricia Neal), he sinks back in her bed and, with his nose deep in a daisy, asks with a leer, “What else you good at?” Rarely has the act of smelling a flower seemed as delectably dirty. It's no wonder that Pauline Kael, who refused to buy just about anything else this movie was selling, gave Mr. Newman his due.

There are some men, Kael wrote, who “project such a traditional heroic frankness and sweetness that the audience dotes on them, seeks to protect them from harm or pain.” Mr. Newman did that for Kael, enough so that she was inspired to write about her own past and the California town that she “and so many of my friends came out of” — and, here, I think she means girlfriends — “escaping from the swaggering small-town hotshots like Hud.”
What's striking is that what got Kael going wasn't the actor or his performance but the man, who, because he seemed to offer up an intangible part of himself, something genuine and real, something we could take home, became a true movie star.
I don't think Mr. Newman was ever as beautiful as he is in “Hud.” His lean, hard-muscled body seems to slash against the wide-screen landscape, evoking the oil derricks to come, and the black-and-white cinematography turns his famous baby blues an eerie shade of gray. The character would be a heartbreaker if he were interested in breaking hearts instead of making time with the bodies that come with them. That's supposed to make Hud a mean man, but mostly he seems self-interested. No one is tearing him apart and Mr. Newman doesn't try to plumb the depths with the role, which makes the character and the performance feel more contemporary than many of the head cases of the previous decade. He finds depths in these shallows.
Early in his career, Mr. Newman was often mistaken for Brando, so much so that he took to signing the other man's autograph. Both studied at the Actors Studio and jumped to Hollywood, but there's not much else to connect them beyond our demand for the Next Big Thing. The resemblance seems hard to grasp now, given their trajectories and how differently the two register onscreen: Brando sizzles, while Mr. Newman is as cool as dry ice. And unlike Brando, who at his death was often unkindly remembered for his baroque excesses, Mr. Newman seemed immune, bulletproof. (An exception: his support for Eugene McCarthy, which landed him on Nixon's enemies list.) He had a talent for evasion.
It was a talent that served him well during the 1960s, the decade in which he picked up the mantle of Hollywood stardom that Brando had shrugged off. Mr. Newman was one of the dominating male screen figures of that decade, appearing in critical and commercial successes like “Cool Hand Luke,” a 1967 prison movie-cum-religious-allegory, and the 1969 western “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” in which he found a partner in charm in Robert Redford. These days, 1969 is more often remembered for another buddy movie, “Easy Rider,” but “Butch Cassidy” may have had more lasting impact on the so-called New Hollywood, which struck gold with two photogenic male leads whose easy, breezy rapport helped transform rebellion into a salable, lucrative package.
Mr. Newman, who signed a contract with Warner Brothers in the 1950s, was a transitional figure between the old Hollywood and the new. Warners foolishly put him in a ludicrous 1954 costume extravaganza called “The Silver Chalice.” He did better as the boxer Rocky Graziano in the 1956 biopic “Somebody Up There Likes Me.” His Lower East Side accent is so thick it could have been served on rye at Katz's Delicatessen, but he holds the screen with his pretty-boy kisser and an intense, at times wild physical performance that suggests a terrific will behind that impeccable facade. He seems to be hurling himself at the camera, as if desperate to get our attention.
The roles improved, as did the performances, and suddenly he didn't seem to be trying as hard. He's silky smooth as a pool shark named Fast Eddie in Robert Rossen's 1961 high-key drama “The Hustler,” in which Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie and George C. Scott each take turns stealing scenes. At first Mr. Newman seems outclassed by his co-stars — the film asks the actor, a nibbler rather than an outright thief, to do too much big acting. But he's still awfully good. He seduces and repels by turn, pulling you in so you can watch him peel Fast Eddie's defenses like layers of dead skin. It's a wonder there was anything left by the time he revived the character 25 years later in “The Color of Money.”
He won an Oscar in 1987 for best actor for resurrecting Fast Eddie in that Martin Scorsese film, a piteously delayed response from his peers, who dangled six such nominations before giving up the prize. (Hedging its bets, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had tossed Mr. Newman an honorary Oscar the year before.) He's superb in “The Color of Money,” gracefully navigating its slick surfaces and periodically scratching beneath them, playing a variation on what had by then in movies like “The Drowning Pool” (1975), “Slap Shot” (1977) and “The Verdict” (1982) become a defining Newman type: the guy on the hustle who seems to have nothing much left but keeps his motor running, just in case.
The movies are not kind to older actors and yet Mr. Newman walked away from this merciless business seemingly unscathed. During his second and third acts, he kept his dignity partly by playing men who seemed to have relinquished theirs through vanity or foolishness. Some of them were holding on to decency in an indecent world; others had nearly let it slip through their fingers.
Decency seems to have come easily to Mr. Newman himself, as evidenced by his philanthropic and political endeavors, which never devolved into self-promotion. It was easy to take his intelligence for granted as well as his talent, which survived even the occasional misstep. At the end of “The Drowning Pool,” a woman wistfully tells Mr. Newman, I wish you'd stay a while. I know how she feels.
Da The New York Times, 28 Settembre 2008

Paul Newman, one of the last of the great 20th-century movie stars, died Friday at his home in Westport, Conn. He was 83.
The cause was cancer, said Jeff Sanderson of Chasen & Company, Mr. Newman's publicists.
If Marlon Brando and James Dean defined the defiant American male as a sullen rebel, Paul Newman recreated him as a likable renegade, a strikingly handsome figure of animal high spirits and blue-eyed candor whose magnetism was almost impossible to resist, whether the character was Hud, Cool Hand Luke or Butch Cassidy.
He acted in more than 65 movies over more than 50 years, drawing on a physical grace, unassuming intelligence and good humor that made it all seem effortless.
Yet he was also an ambitious, intellectual actor and a passionate student of his craft, and he achieved what most of his peers find impossible: remaining a major star into a craggy, charismatic old age even as he redefined himself as more than Hollywood star. He raced cars, opened summer camps for ailing children and became a nonprofit entrepreneur with a line of foods that put his picture on supermarket shelves around the world.
Mr. Newman made his Hollywood debut in the 1954 costume film “The Silver Chalice.” Stardom arrived a year and a half later, when he inherited from James Dean the role of the boxer Rocky Graziano in “Somebody Up There Likes Me.” Mr. Dean had been killed in a car crash before the screenplay was finished.
It was a rapid rise for Mr. Newman, but being taken seriously as an actor took longer. He was almost undone by his star power, his classic good looks and, most of all, his brilliant blue eyes. “I picture my epitaph,” he once said. “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.”
Mr. Newman's filmography was a cavalcade of flawed heroes and winning antiheroes stretching over decades. In 1958 he was a drifting confidence man determined to marry a Southern belle in an adaptation of “The Long, Hot Summer.” In 1982, in “The Verdict,” he was a washed-up alcoholic lawyer who finds a chance to redeem himself in a medical malpractice case.
And in 2002, at 77, having lost none of his charm, he was affably deadly as Tom Hanks's gangster boss in “Road to Perdition.” It was his last onscreen role in a major theatrical release. (He supplied the voice of the veteran race car Doc in the Pixar animated film “Cars” in 2006.)
Few major American stars have chosen to play so many imperfect men.
As Hud Bannon in “Hud” (1963) Mr. Newman was a heel on the Texas range who wanted the good life and was willing to sell diseased cattle to get it. The character was intended to make the audience feel “loathing and disgust,” Mr. Newman told a reporter. Instead, he said, “we created a folk hero.”
As the self-destructive convict in “Cool Hand Luke” (1967) Mr. Newman was too rebellious to be broken by a brutal prison system. As Butch Cassidy in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) he was the most amiable and antic of bank robbers, memorably paired with Robert Redford. And in “The Hustler” (1961) he was the small-time pool shark Fast Eddie, a role he recreated 25 years later, now as a well-heeled middle-aged liquor salesman, in “The Color of Money” (1986).

That performance, alongside Tom Cruise, brought Mr. Newman his sole Academy Award, for best actor, after he had been nominated for that prize six times. In all he received eight Oscar nominations for best actor and one for best supporting actor, in “Road to Perdition.” “Rachel, Rachel,” which he directed, was nominated for best picture.
“When a role is right for him, he's peerless,” the film critic Pauline Kael wrote in 1977. “Newman is most comfortable in a role when it isn't scaled heroically; even when he plays a bastard, he's not a big bastard — only a callow, selfish one, like Hud. He can play what he's not — a dumb lout. But you don't believe it when he plays someone perverse or vicious, and the older he gets and the better you know him, the less you believe it. His likableness is infectious; nobody should ever be asked not to like Paul Newman.”
But the movies and the occasional stage role were never enough for him. He became a successful racecar driver, winning several Sports Car Club of America national driving titles. He even competed at Daytona in 1995 as a 70th birthday present to himself. In 1982, as a lark, he decided to sell a salad dressing he had created and bottled for friends at Christmas. Thus was born the Newman's Own brand, an enterprise he started with his friend A. E. Hotchner, the writer. More than 25 years later the brand has expanded to include, among other foods, lemonade, popcorn, spaghetti sauce, pretzels, organic Fig Newmans and wine. (His daughter Nell Newman runs the company's organic arm.) All its profits, of more than $200 million, have been donated to charity, the company says.
Much of the money was used to create a string of Hole in the Wall Gang Camps, named for the outlaw gang in “Butch Cassidy.” The camps provide free summer recreation for children with cancer and other serious illnesses. Mr. Newman was actively involved in the project, even choosing cowboy hats as gear so that children who had lost their hair because of chemotherapy could disguise their baldness.

Several years before the establishment of Newman's Own, on Nov. 28, 1978, Scott Newman, the oldest of Mr. Newman's six children and his only son, died at 28 of an overdose of alcohol and pills. His father's monument to him was the Scott Newman Center, created to publicize the dangers of drugs and alcohol. It is headed by Susan Newman, the oldest of his five daughters.
Mr. Newman's three younger daughters are the children of his 50-year second marriage, to the actress Joanne Woodward. Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward both were cast — she as an understudy — in the Broadway play “Picnic” in 1953. Starting with “The Long, Hot Summer” in 1958, they co-starred in 10 movies, including “From the Terrace” (1960), based on a John O'Hara novel about a driven executive and his unfaithful wife; “Harry & Son” (1984), which Mr. Newman also directed, produced and helped write; and “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge” (1990), James Ivory's version of a pair of Evan S. Connell novels, in which Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward played a conservative Midwestern couple coping with life's changes.
When good roles for Ms. Woodward dwindled, Mr. Newman produced and directed “Rachel, Rachel” for her in 1968. Nominated for the best-picture Oscar, the film, a delicate story of a spinster schoolteacher tentatively hoping for love, brought Ms. Woodward her second of four best-actress Oscar nominations. (She won the award on her first nomination, for the 1957 film “The Three Faces of Eve,” and was nominated again for her roles in “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge” and the 1973 movie “Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams.”)
Mr. Newman also directed his wife in “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” (1972), “The Glass Menagerie” (1987) and the television movie “The Shadow Box” (1980). As a director his most ambitious film was “Sometimes a Great Notion” (1971), based on the Ken Kesey novel.
In an industry in which long marriages might be defined as those that last beyond the first year and the first infidelity, Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward's was striking for its endurance. But they admitted that it was often turbulent. She loved opera and ballet. He liked playing practical jokes and racing cars. But as Mr. Newman told Playboy magazine, in an often-repeated quotation about marital fidelity, “I have steak at home; why go out for hamburger?”
Beginnings in Cleveland
Paul Leonard Newman was born on Jan. 26, 1925, in Cleveland. His mother, the former Teresa Fetzer, was a Roman Catholic who turned to Christian Science. His father, Arthur, who was Jewish, owned a thriving sporting goods store that enabled the family to settle in affluent Shaker Heights, Ohio, where Paul and his older brother, Arthur, grew up.
Teresa Newman, an avid theatergoer, steered her son toward acting as a child. In high school, besides playing football, he acted in school plays, graduating in 1943. After less than a year at Ohio University at Athens, he joined the Navy Air Corps to be a pilot. When a test showed he was colorblind, he was made an aircraft radio operator.
After the war Mr. Newman entered Kenyon College in Ohio on an athletic scholarship. He played football and acted in a dozen plays before graduating in 1949.
Arthur Newman, a strict and distant man, thought acting an impractical occupation, but, perhaps persuaded by his wife, he agreed to support his son for a year while Paul acted in small theater companies.
In May 1950 his father died, and Mr. Newman returned to Cleveland to run the sporting goods store. He brought with him a wife, Jacqueline Witte, an actress he had met in summer stock. But after 18 months Paul asked his brother to take over the business while he, his wife and their year-old son, Scott, headed for Yale University, where Mr. Newman intended to concentrate on directing.
He left Yale in the summer of 1952, perhaps because the money had run out and his wife was pregnant again. But almost immediately, the director Josh Logan and the playwright William Inge gave him a small role in “Picnic,” a play that was to run 14 months on Broadway. Soon he was playing the second male lead and understudying Ralph Meeker as the sexy drifter who roils the women in a Kansas town.
Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward were attracted to each other in rehearsals of “Picnic.” But he was a married man, and Ms. Woodward has insisted that they spent the next several years running away from each other.
In the early 1950s roles in live television came easily to both of them. Mr. Newman starred in segments of “You Are There,” “Goodyear Television Playhouse” and other shows.
He was also accepted as a student at the Actors Studio in New York, where he took lessons alongside James Dean, Geraldine Page, Marlon Brando and, eventually, Ms. Woodward.
Then Hollywood knocked. In 1954 Warner Brothers offered Mr. Newman $1,000 a week to star in “The Silver Chalice” as the Greek slave who creates the silver cup used at the Last Supper. Mr. Newman, who rarely watched his own films, once gave out pots, wooden spoons and whistles to a roomful of guests and forced them to sit through “The Silver Chalice,” which he called the worst movie ever made.
His antidote for that early Hollywood experience was to hurry back to Broadway. In Joseph Hayes's play “The Desperate Hours,” he starred as an escaped convict who holds a family hostage. The play was a hit, and during its run, Jacqueline Newman gave birth to their third child.
On his nights off Mr. Newman acted on live television. In one production he had the title role in “The Death of Billy the Kid,” a psychological study of the outlaw written by Gore Vidal and directed by Arthur Penn for “Philco Playhouse”; in another, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's short story “The Battler,” he took over the lead role after James Dean, who had been scheduled to star, was killed on Sept. 30, 1955.
Mr. Penn, who directed “The Battler,” was later sure that Mr. Newman's performance in that drama, as a disfigured prizefighter, won him the lead role in “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” again replacing Dean. When Mr. Penn adapted the Billy the Kid teleplay for his first Hollywood film, “The Left Handed Gun,” in 1958, he again cast Mr. Newman in the lead.
Even so, Mr. Newman was saddled for years with an image of being a “pretty boy” lightweight.
“Paul suffered a little bit from being so handsome — people doubted just how well he could act,” Mr. Penn told the authors of the 1988 book “Paul and Joanne.”
By 1957 Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward were discreetly living together in Hollywood; his wife had initially refused to give him a divorce. He later admitted that his drinking was out of control during this period.
With his divorce granted, Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward were married on Jan. 29, 1958, and went on to rear their three daughters far from Hollywood, in a farmhouse on 15 acres in Westport, Conn.
That same year Mr. Newman played Brick, the reluctant husband of Maggie the Cat, in the film version of Tennessee Williams's “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” earning his first Academy Award nomination, for best actor. In 1961, with “The Hustler,” he earned his second best-actor Oscar nomination. He had become more than a matinee idol.
Directed by Martin Ritt
Many of his meaty performances during the early '60s came in movies directed by Martin Ritt, who had been a teaching assistant to Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio when Mr. Newman was a student. After directing “The Long, Hot Summer,” Mr. Ritt directed Mr. Newman in “Paris Blues” (1961), a story of expatriate musicians; “Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man” (1962); “Hud” (1963), which brought Mr. Newman a third Oscar nomination; “The Outrage” (1964), with Mr. Newman as the bandit in a western based on Akira Kurosawa's “Rashomon”; and “Hombre” (1967), in which Mr. Newman played a white man, reared by Indians, struggling to live in a white world.
Among his other important films were Otto Preminger's “Exodus” (1960), Alfred Hitchcock's “Torn Curtain” (1966) and Jack Smight's “Harper” (1966), in which he played Ross Macdonald's private detective Lew Archer.
In 1968 — after he was cast as an ice-cold racecar driver in “Winning,” with Ms. Woodward playing his frustrated wife — Mr. Newman was sent to a racing school. In midlife racing became his obsession. A Web site — newman-haas.com — details his racing career, including his first race in 1972; his first professional victory, in 1982; and his co-ownership of the Newman/Haas Indy racing team, which won eight series championships.
A politically active liberal Democrat, Mr. Newman was a Eugene McCarthy delegate to the 1968 Democratic convention and appointed by President Jimmy Carter to a United NationsGeneral Assembly session on disarmament. He expressed pride at being on President Richard M. Nixon's enemies list.
When Mr. Newman turned 50, he settled into a new career as a character actor, playing the title role — “with just the right blend of craftiness and stupidity,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times — of Robert Altman's “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” (1976); an unscrupulous hockey coach in George Roy Hill's “Slap Shot” (1977); and the disintegrating lawyer in Sidney Lumet's “Verdict.”
Most of Mr. Newman's films were commercial hits, probably none more so than “The Sting” (1973), in which he teamed with Mr. Redford again to play a couple of con men, and “The Towering Inferno” (1974), in which he played an architect in an all-star cast that included Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway.
After his fifth best-actor Oscar nomination, for his portrait of an innocent man discredited by the press in Sydney Pollack's “Absence of Malice” (1981), and his sixth a year later, for “The Verdict,” the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1986 gave Mr. Newman the consolation prize of an honorary award. In a videotaped acceptance speech he said, “I am especially grateful that this did not come wrapped in a gift certificate to Forest Lawn.”
His best-actor Oscar, for “The Color of Money,” came the next year, and at the 1994 Oscars ceremony he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. The year after that he earned his eighth nomination as best actor, for his curmudgeonly construction worker trying to come to terms with his failures in “Nobody's Fool” (1994). In 2003 he was nominated as best supporting actor for his work in “Road to Perdition.” And in 2006 he took home both a Golden Globe and an Emmy for playing another rough-hewn old-timer, this one in the HBO mini-series “Empire Falls.”
Besides Ms. Woodward and his daughters Susan and Nell, he is survived by three other daughters, Stephanie, Melissa and Clea; two grandchildren; and his brother.
Mr. Newman returned to Broadway for the last time in 2002, as the Stage Manager in a lucrative revival of Thornton Wilder's “Our Town.” The performance was nominated for a Tony Award, though critics tended to find it modest. When the play was broadcast on PBS in 2003, he won an Emmy.
This year he had planned to direct “Of Mice and Men,” based on the John Steinbeck novel, in October at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut. But in May he announced that he was stepping aside, citing his health.
Mr. Newman's last screen credit was as the narrator of Bill Haney's documentary “The Price of Sugar,” released this year. By then he had all but announced that he was through with acting.
“I'm not able to work anymore as an actor at the level I would want to,” Mr. Newman said last year on the ABC program “Good Morning America.” “You start to lose your memory, your confidence, your invention. So that's pretty much a closed book for me.”
But he remained fulfilled by his charitable work, saying it was his greatest legacy, particularly in giving ailing children a camp at which to play.
“We are such spendthrifts with our lives,” Mr. Newman once told a reporter. “The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I'm not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”
Da The New York Times, 28 Settembre 2008

L'attore americano Paul Newman è morto venerdì all'età di 83 anni.
Allievo dell'Actor's Studio,protagonista di film di larghissimo successo come Lo spaccone, La stangata, Butch Cassidy e Il colore dei soldi ( per il quale vinse l'Oscar nel 1986),pilota di auto da corsa, ha dedicato l'ultima parte della sua vita alla beneficenza.
Il primo film di Paul Newman, scomparso venerdì all'età di 83 anni, non se lo ricorda quasi più nessuno (Il calice d'argento di Victor Saville, del 1954). Anzi, le biografie riportano il giudizio del «New Yorker», che bollava così la sua prova: «Recita la parte con il fervore emotivo di un autista d'autobus che annuncia le fermate». Quel critico forse aveva ragione sul singolo film, ma visto in prospettiva prendeva un granchio colossale. Newman veniva da una scuola che raramente ha sbagliato: dopo aver studiato arte drammatica alla Yale University, era approdato al mitico Actor's Studio di New York, la fucina dei divi. Un marchio di fabbrica che si è sempre portato appresso la tendenza a caricare emotivamente i personaggi, insieme alla capacità di fermarsi al punto giusto, un attimo prima di strafare. Con quello sguardo «un po' così », quel fascino tanto naturale e insieme consapevole e coltivato, quella facoltà di guardare oltre lo schermo, arrivando dritto al cuore degli spettatori.

Tutte facoltà che un film di poco successivo, questo sì già memorabile, afferma in pieno: Lassù qualcuno mi ama, di Robert Wise. Newman accetta il sacrificio del suo volto e del suo corpo per interpretare il grande pugile italoamericano Rocky Graziano. Il ring, i pugni, una volontà ferrea, i problemi della vita privata. Ci voleva un grande per portare sullo schermo una personalità del pugilato così forte: e l'attore, chiamato a sostenere una parte prevista per James Dean (mentre nel Calice d'argento era previsto in un primo tempo un riluttante Marlon Brando), dimostra di esserlo in pieno.
A partire da questo momento i successi arrivano con cadenza impressionante. Newman è davvero un "nuovo uomo". Piace, coinvolge, addirittura sconvolge interpretando film che segnano il passaggio di Hollywood verso una fase nuova: temi diversi da quelli classici, mentre il sistema dei generi comincia a dare segni di stanchezza; ricerca di pubblici alternativi. Così, a cavallo fra gli anni 50 e 60,inizia il periodo d'oro di La lunga estate calda (Martin Ritt), Furia selvaggia (Arthur Penn), La gatta sul tetto che scotta (Richard Brooks; tutti e tre del 1958), I segreti di Filadelfia, Dalla terrazza, Exodus.
Meriterebbero ognuno un discorso a parte, se non fosse che nel '61 arriva il personaggio forse più noto dell'intera carriera, quell'Eddie Felson (Lo spaccone, regia di Robert Rossen) che sembra aderire alla perfezione all'attore. Giocatore incallito di biliardo, sempre pronto all'azzardo, una faccia da schiaffi che fa anche simpatia. Un personaggio ripreso nell'86, quando Martin Scorsese lo ritrova sì avanti negli anni, ma con la stessa divorante passione, nel Colore dei soldi (con il quale vince l'Oscar come miglior attore).
Oltre ad essere un "bello", Newman è anche un "impegnato". Negli anni 60 molte delle sue interpretazioni condensano in pieno lo spirito del tempo,l'insofferenza per i vincoli, la voglia di libertà, anche infrangendo leggi che si sentono ingiuste. È il caso di Nick mano fredda, diretto nel '67 da Stuart Rosenberg (ma, nei primi anni della favolosa decade, bisogna almeno citare La dolce ala della giovinezza, Intrigo a Stoccolma, L'oltraggio, Il sipario strappato di Alfred Hitchcock): quanti giovani, in tutto il mondo, si sono immedesimati in quel detenuto che resiste testardamente e stoicamente alle angherie del sadico direttore della prigione. Niente e nessuno possono vincerlo: solo la morte può liberare un eroe così grande, decretandone la vittoria morale. È il momento della piena maturità. Newman invecchia bene, accettando interpretazioni ( a cui alterna prove di regia) che aderiscono alla sua personalità. Spesso accanto alla seconda moglie Joanne Woodward e molte altre volte insieme a un'altra icona liberal, Robert Redford. Come nei due film di maggiore successo al botteghino, Butch Cassidy e La stangata, entrambi diretti da George Roy Hill. Seguono le opere con Robert Altman (Buffalo Bill e gli indiani e Quintet) ei film dell'intensa vecchiaia, da Mister Hula Hoop dei fratelli Coen a La vita a modo mio di Robert Benton, fino a Era mio padre di Sam Mendes.
Questo l'attore e il regista. Ma il quadro non sarebbe completo, per capire almeno un poco l'uomo, senza menzionare due passioni che hanno accompagnato Newman per tutta la vita: l'automobilismo e la beneficenza. Nel 1995, a 72 anni suonati, è stato in grado di vincere la 24 Ore di Daytona nella classe GT1; e per quanto riguarda l'attenzione agli altri, fa testo la fondazione Newman's Own che a partire dal 1982 ha distribuito oltre 250 milioni di dollari per scopi educativi e umanitari: ha sostenuto la nascita in tutto il mondo di campi estivi per bambini malati (Hole in the Wall camp). In Italia, il campo è partito l'anno scorso, in collaborazione con Fondazione Dynamo di Vincenzo Manes.
Da Il Sole-24 Ore, 28 Settembre 2008

The blue-eyed star of 'The Hustler,' 'Cool Hand Luke' and 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' was at home. He had long battled cancer.
Paul Newman, the legendary movie star and irreverent cultural icon who created a model philanthropy fueled by profits from a salad dressing that became nearly as famous as he was, has died. He was 83.
Newman died Friday at his home near Westport, Conn., after a long battle with cancer, publicist Jeff Sanderson said.
Stunningly handsome, Newman maintained his superstar status while keeping his distance from its corrupting influences through nearly 100 Broadway, television and movie roles. As an actor and director, he evolved into Hollywood's elder statesman, admired off screen for his quiet generosity, unconventional business sense, race car daring, political activism and enduring marriage to actress Joanne Woodward.
Annoyed by the public's fascination with his resemblance to a Roman statue and his Windex-blue eyes, Newman often chose offbeat character roles. In the 1960s, he helped define the American anti-hero and became identified with the charming misfits, cads and con men in film classics such as "The Hustler," "Hud," "Cool Hand Luke" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."
"It's a great loss, in so many ways," Martin Scorsese, who directed Newman in "The Color of Money," said in a statement Saturday. "The history of movies without Paul Newman? It's unthinkable. . . . His powerful eloquence, his consummate sense of craft, so consummate that you didn't see any sense of effort up there on the screen, set a new standard."
Robert Redford, Newman's "Sundance" co-star, said in a statement, "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."
Newman's poker-game look in "The Sting" -- cunning, watchful, removed, amused, confident, alert -- summed up his power as a person and actor, said Stewart Stern, a screenwriter and longtime friend.
"You never see the whole deck. There's always some card somewhere he may or may not play," Stern said. "Maybe he doesn't even have it."
Newman maintained his success came less from natural talent than from hard work, luck and the tenacity of a terrier.
"Acting," he once said, "is really nothing but exploring certain facets of your own personality trying to become someone else." In early films, he said, he tried to make himself fit the character but later aimed "to make the character come to me."
The actor was proudest, friends say, of his later Oscar-nominated roles in "Absence of Malice," "The Verdict" and "Nobody's Fool," in which he dug deep into the complex emotions of ordinary men struggling for dignity, justice or a sense of connection. In 2003, he was nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actor for his last feature film appearance, as a conflicted mob boss in "Road to Perdition." Two years later, at 80, he won an Emmy for playing a meddlesome father in "Empire Falls."
"He's a majestic figure in the world of acting," said director Arthur Penn, who worked with him in his early career. "He did everything and did it well."
Part of a generation of edgy, naturalistic New York actors who changed Hollywood in the '50s and '60s, Newman was often compared with fellow Method actors Marlon Brando and James Dean. Film critic David Ansen once observed that if the trim actor lacked the others' physical or psychic presence, he was more approachable, even when he played a heel.
"Newman," Ansen wrote, "is our great middleweight movie star."
Nominated eight times for Academy Awards in the best-actor category, Newman won only once, for "The Color of Money" (1986), in which he reprised the role of "Fast" Eddie Felson that he originated in 1961's "The Hustler." He also took home honorary Oscars in 1985 for career achievement and in 1993 for his humanitarian efforts. In later years, he shunned awards shows, though Oscar, Emmy and Tony nominations continued. He claimed he no longer owned a tuxedo.

In real life, Newman was "the quintessence of class, courtly without being old-fashioned," said Victor Navasky, former editor of the Nation, a liberal magazine in which Newman invested and for which he wrote occasional columns. Private and complex, Newman was also a mischievous beer-loving prankster and an idealist who took to the streets to protest the war in Vietnam.
He was thrilled, friends said, when he heard that he had made President Nixon's enemies list.
Married since 1958 to Woodward, his second wife, Newman cultivated a distinctly un-Hollywood lifestyle, shuttling between a homey New York apartment and a renovated farmhouse in woodsy Westport, from which he pursued passions that included cooking and auto racing.
Highly competitive, Newman was drawn to the track, he told reporters, because in racing, unlike acting, the definition of "good" is not a murky matter of opinion. Although he began to race at 47, he was respected by his sport's peers, and his team placed second in the prestigious Le Mans endurance contest in 1979. At 70, he became the oldest driver to place in a professionally sanctioned auto race when his team took third in the 24-hour race at Daytona, Fla. Still racing into his 80s, Newman escaped uninjured from a car fire in 2005 and entered another race a month later.
Since the 1980s, Newman had devoted more time to Newman's Own, a food products company he founded as a lark that grew into one of the nation's largest charitable organizations. The company, which produces all-natural salad dressings, popcorn, sauces and lemonade, has turned over more than $250 million in after-tax profits to hundreds of groups, including his own Hole in the Wall Gang camps (named after the outlaw gang in "Butch Cassidy").
Friends said Newman abhorred what he called "noisy philanthropy." He felt the awards and honors offered him were excessive and once declined a national medal in a letter to President Clinton, calling such recognition "honorrhea."
When people would say, " 'What a mensch you are,' he would always denigrate himself," said friend Alice Trillin. To friends, Newman was open, if vague, about not always having lived an exemplary life. Exceptionally tolerant of others' foibles, he said, "I used to be a fool myself."

A late bloomer
Friends and neighbors in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights might not have foreseen a future as a sex symbol for Paul Leonard Newman, the late-blooming second son of a sporting goods store owner.
Born Jan. 26, 1925, Newman was too short and scrawny to play football or baseball and once said he regularly had "the bejesus kicked out" of him in school. He was encouraged in the arts by an uncle who wrote poetry and by his mother, who taught him to appreciate music and books and shared details of theater shows she had seen.
Though he acted in elementary and high school plays to the delight of his family, he said his father, a strict, hard-working former journalist, considered him a lightweight and often treated him as if he were disappointed in him.
"I desperately wanted to show him that somehow, somewhere along the line, I could cut the mustard," Newman told Time magazine in 1982. One of the great agonies of his life, he said, was that his father died without seeing his success.
At 18, Newman enlisted in the Navy, hoping to become a pilot in World War II, but he was rejected for being color blind. He spent three years as a radio operator aboard bombers in the Pacific.
Afterward, he enrolled as a 21-year-old freshman at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where he spent some of his happiest days, playing second-string football, drinking beer and getting into trouble. After a barroom brawl landed him in jail, he was kicked off the team. He turned to acting.
"I was probably one of the worst college actors at the time," Newman said years later. "I learned my lines by rote and simply said them without spontaneity, without knowing what it meant to act and react."
However, novelist E.L. Doctorow, a Kenyon freshman at the time, recalled that "there was no question about his talent." He said Newman was popular for being the leading actor on campus and for the laundry concession he operated.
"He was always entrepreneurial," Doctorow said.
After graduating with a degree in English, Newman acted in summer and winter stock productions in Wisconsin and Illinois, thinking he might eventually teach speech or drama. By then, he had married Jacqueline Witte, a fellow actor, with whom he had three children: Scott, Susan and Stephanie. Scott died in 1978 of an overdose of drugs and alcohol.
When his father died in 1950, Newman moved home to run the sporting goods store. A year later, the store was sold and he fled to New Haven, Conn., where he briefly studied drama at Yale University, specializing in directing, before trying his luck in New York.
"I was prepared to try it for a year and, if I got nowhere, to go back to Yale and get my degree," he told Lillian and Helen Ross in the book "The Player: A Profile of an Art." "I had no intention of waiting around till I was old and bruised and bitter."
In New York, then the center of live television and the home of the Actors Studio, Newman picked up lessons in Method acting, a technique that stressed naturalism, while he auditioned for parts and sold encyclopedias to support his family. He subsequently attributed everything he knew about acting to the creative community of actors, writers and directors at the studio. Later, he was president and, though it was never made public, financed the institution's operations for seven years when it fell on hard times.
Described as "gorgeous and intense," the young Newman quickly found small parts in television shows, including "You Are There," as well as a role as a rich college graduate in the Broadway production of "Picnic," in which Woodward was an understudy. When he asked to play the lead, a sexy braggart, director Joshua Logan said the actor was unsuitable because he lacked any "sexual threat" -- a challenge Newman met by embarking on a lifelong routine of vigorous workouts to stay in shape.
His marriage to Witte deteriorated as he began to attract work and positive reviews while his wife's priorities shifted to the children, according to friends. Newman fell into a period of turmoil in which he and Woodward began an affair.
He was arrested once for running a red light, driving into a bush and leaving the scene of an accident. The breakup of his marriage was drawn out, Stern said, because Newman was so concerned about being fair to his wife and children.
Witte obtained a divorce in Mexico in 1957. A year later, Newman and Woodward married, forming a lasting match that Newman attributed to "correct amounts of lust and respect." The couple had three daughters, Nell, Melissa and Clea.
Despite later rumors that not all was well in their marriage, Stern said they were committed and honored each other's choices in life. Although Woodward once quipped that "a mind is a terrible thing to waste on a Trans Am," Stern said, "they had real reverence for each other's talents and pursuits and idiosyncrasies."
Together they appeared in 11 films, including "The Long, Hot Summer," "From the Terrace" and "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge." Newman also directed her in four other films, including the highly respected "Rachel, Rachel," about a schoolteacher whose fears keep her trapped in a small town.
Stern, author of that film's screenplay, said he sometimes observed Newman watching his wife do something that moved him.
"It was the most exposed face of love I've ever looked at," he said. "You couldn't look at it long. It was like opening the wrong door."
Hollywood studios recruited Newman in 1954, at a time when the film industry, threatened by live television, hired many of New York's most creative actors, directors and writers. According to Penn, Newman "was emblematic of what was coming, the demand for independence that the next generation brought."
At first, however, Newman, the serious actor, could not avoid beefcake roles because his looks were so devastating. When people saw him, Penn said, they "just fell away."
Newman was particularly humiliated by his first film, "The Silver Chalice," in which he was cast as a toga-clad Greek sculptor with stilted lines. When the film aired for a week in 1963 on television, he took out a black-bordered ad in The Times that said, "Paul Newman apologizes every night this week."
Determined not to be just a pretty-boy player for the studio, Newman was among the first actors to buy out his contract with Warner Bros. and later formed his own production companies with colleagues. Newman's penchant for playing a variety of roles reflected "his imagination and his willingness to take a flier," filmmaker John Huston wrote in his memoir, "An Open Book."
The price was a career checkered with miscasting and forgettable roles, including those of a jazz musician in "Paris Blues," a turn-of-the-century anarchist in "Lady L" and a double agent in "Torn Curtain."
Critics and audiences loved him, however, when he played moody Southerners in films based on Tennessee Williams' plays "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "Sweet Bird of Youth." Newman's scheming pool shark in "The Hustler" began a streak of roles that film historians have hailed as capturing the essence of the postwar American man: cool, cynical and confident while the known world of traditional values crumbles around him.
Newman became so popular that he complained later that audiences and critics missed the point in "Hud," a film in which he portrayed the amoral, insolent son of an embattled rancher. Instead of seeing Hud as a tragically flawed character who cared only for himself, audiences adored him. He became an anti-hero, especially among teenagers.
Newman struck another nerve in 1967 with "Cool Hand Luke," in which he played a defiant prisoner on a chain gang harassed by sadistic guards. A memorable scene in which Luke wins a bet by eating 50 hard-boiled eggs triggered egg-eating contests at colleges and among soldiers in Vietnam.
In 1969, when he was Hollywood's most popular leading actor, Newman teamed with Redford in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," a movie about two affable bandits who had outlived their time. The highest-grossing western in motion picture history, the film highlighted the handsome duo's comic timing. Fans loved the pair's jump off a cliff and still associate the song "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" with Newman's bicycle stunts.
Redford said it was the most fun on a film he had ever had, and the film cemented a lifelong friendship between the two actors.
Out of Beverly Hills
If Newman hadn't moved his family away from the glamour and materialism of Beverly Hills to Westport in 1962, he told biographer Eric Lax, he might never have taken up the other things that made his life exciting: politics, racing and a home-grown business.
"It is only when you're away from California that you cannot take yourself seriously" as a movie star, he said.
Throughout the '60s, Newman took high-profile stands against the war in Vietnam. In 1968, he campaigned for antiwar candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy and was a Connecticut delegate to the Democratic National Convention. The next year, he and Woodward joined an antiwar demonstration in front of the U.S. Embassy in London.
Newman knew his actions were not always popular, and he told the New York Times Magazine in 1966, "A person without character has no enemies." Friends said he was delighted in 1973 when he was listed as No. 19 on Nixon's enemies list, claiming it elevated him in the eyes of his children.
Newman argued politics genially, friends said, and openly admired some conservatives. In 1994, he helped his brother Arthur, a staunch Republican, wage a successful campaign for a City Council seat in Rancho Mirage.
In the late '70s, bored with acting, Newman fell into a slump that paved the way for what has been called one of the most successful career transitions in movie history.
Intrigued by racing after making the film "Winning" in 1969, Newman began planning film shoots around his racing schedule. His focus, athleticism and knowledge quickly won over skeptics who were used to dilettante actors hanging around the track, said champion driver Mario Andretti.
"If he would have started earlier, he would have been just as successful as his acting, no question," Andretti said. When Newman formed his own team, Newman-Haas Racing, Andretti raced for him for 12 years.
Reinvigorated, Newman returned to acting, exploring character roles with new and unexpected depth. Critic Pauline Kael called Newman's portrayal of a washed-up ice hockey coach in "Slap Shot," a 1977 comedy, "casual American star-acting at its peak." In the 1980s, he became active again in the Actors Studio in New York, contributing funds and serving as president of the board.
In 1981, Newman was nominated for an Oscar for his role in "Absence of Malice," as a businessman libeled by Sally Field's gung-ho young reporter, whose story leads to his friend's suicide.
Another nomination followed for his portrayal of an alcoholic lawyer redeemed by his pursuit of justice in 1982's "The Verdict."
When Newman finally won an Oscar in 1986 for "The Color of Money," it was neither his nor director Scorsese's best effort and was seen by some observers as compensation for having been overlooked in "The Hustler."
Wanting to avoid another public defeat, Newman stayed home for the ceremony. Later, he said of the win: "It's like chasing a beautiful woman for 80 years. She finally relents and you say, 'I'm terribly sorry, I'm tired.' "
His real-life role as a philanthropist began just before Christmas 1980 when he and his friend A.E. Hotchner made a batch of salad dressing in a bathtub to bottle for friends.
Newman was as much a perfectionist about his cooking as his art, friends said. "He knew the exact amount of fat that goes into the perfect hamburger," Stern said. "In his salads, he sliced the celery the exact width."
In restaurants, Newman was known to ask for olive oil, vinegar, chopped celery, salt, pepper and mustard to make his own dressing. On one occasion, when waiters at Chasen's in Beverly Hills wouldn't comply, he took the salad into the men's room and washed the dressing off. "They brought the stuff he wanted, and he made the dressing," Stern said.
Newman told reporters he never imagined the dressing would be sold nationally, but after the Christmas leftovers were given to gourmet shops, the lark became a challenge.
When it became clear the dressing could make a profit, especially with his face on the label, Newman decided to give back some of what luck and the world had given him.
"It was a spur-of-the-moment thing -- 'Let's just do this and give it all away,' " his daughter Nell told the New York Times in 1998.
Newman and Hotchner wrote witty labels to go with the company's motto: "Shameless exploitation in pursuit of the common good," which later became the name of their book that describes their adventures in business.
The company grew to produce many products, including popcorn, salsas, pasta sauces, marinades and Woodward's "Old Fashioned Roadside Virgin Lemonade."
In 2006, he opened Dressing Room: A Homegrown Restaurant to benefit the Westport Country Playhouse, one of Newman and Woodward's favorite projects.
As a result of his business success, Newman donated more than $250 million to 1,000 groups, including the Scott Newman Center -- devoted to anti-drug education -- and several Hole in the Wall Gang camps, designed for children with life-threatening diseases, with locations in France, Ireland and Israel as well as the U.S. Every summer, Newman stayed at the original camp in Ashford, Conn., where he told ghost stories and staged shows with other celebrities for children who knew him only as the face on the lemonade carton.
"If I leave a legacy," he said in 2006, "it will be the camps."
This year, he turned up at a meeting of parents and children at the first camp and reportedly said: "I wanted to acknowledge luck. The beneficence of it in many lives and the brutality of it in the lives of others, especially children, who might not have a lifetime to make up for it."
Rather than hiring grant officers, friends say, Newman and Hotchner chose the charities themselves in a casual way. Newman once wrote a check on the spot for someone who knocked on his door saying the local fire department needed a new fire engine, said Navasky, the Nation magazine editor.
Despite his fears that actors risk corruption by placing a "premium on appearance," Newman valued keeping himself fit. He did push ups and ran up and down stairs until he was 80. He soaked his face in ice water or would swim in a cold lake when he could.
Newman played sexy-senior roles into his 70s with films such as "Twilight" and moved on to cantankerous-father parts in "Message in a Bottle" and the TV film "Empire Falls." He was nominated for a Tony as the stage manager in a Broadway revival of "Our Town" and an Emmy for a taped TV version. After "Road to Perdition," he did voice work for the animated film "Cars" in 2006.
Newman didn't hide his disappointment that filmmaking had abandoned the "theater of the mind" for the "theater of the senses." He lamented that skyrocketing costs had increased the pressure on actors, writers and producers who could no longer afford to make mistakes and be part of a "growing-up process."
In 1997, he hinted he was struggling, explaining to National Public Radio's Daniel Zwerdling that "sometimes you begin to lose your center. . . . You become a collection of the successful mannerisms of the characters you play. . . . What you try to do is get rid of those successful mannerisms, get back to what you are at the core of your own personality."
In 2007, Newman announced his decision to retire, saying he'd lost confidence in his abilities, that acting was "pretty much a closed book for me."
Besides Doc Hudson, the animated Hornet voiced by Newman in the film "Cars," he called the role of Sully in 1994's "Nobody's Fool" the closest he had come to playing himself. Critics called Sully a "classic Newman type" -- an aging version of a witty loner who keeps friends and family at a distance to protect himself. A bond with his fearful little grandson opens up the possibility of becoming more involved with an estranged son and the rest of the community.
"The most Paul moment," Stern said, "is when he sees the crazy lady down the street and offers his arm and walks her back home as if she were a queen. That's how I'll always remember Paul: dignifying other people."
In addition to his wife of 50 years, Newman is survived by daughters Susan, Stephanie, Nell, Melissa and Clea; two grandchildren; and his brother Arthur.
Da The Los Angeles Times, 28 Settembre 2008

Refusing to romanticize his nonconformist characters, the star put his sex appeal to complicated and fascinating use.
Paul Newman, that pure and concentrated essence of classic movie stardom, reinvented himself a couple of times in the span of his long career, until he ended up playing the kind of guy he might have become had he never left his native Shaker Heights, Ohio: an ultra-conservative, cold-fish Midwestern lawyer, married for decades to the same woman (see his performance in the Merchant-Ivory jewel box "Mr. And Mrs. Bridge," from 1990).
But he'll be best remembered for playing the polar opposite, a recurring persona he took up and reprised from 1958 through 1969, the nonconformist ne'er-do-well, idolized by criminals and women who knew better, reviled by authority and tradition.

A quick survey of the characters Newman inhabited during that time reveals several recurring traits. There's the matter of his alarming beauty, which was almost always treated as a complicating factor in his characters' lives. An otherworldly Adonis, he could have simply gone the tuxedo route, but he had a fondness for playing rough-and-tumble losers, drunks, failures and outcasts. His rebel nonconformists were often nonconformist in pointless, self-serving, usually self-destructive ways that he refused to romanticize.
Remarkably, he was almost never paired with the great beauties of his time, appearing instead opposite actresses of lesser looks than his. Piper Laurie, Patricia Neal, even Joanne Woodward -- whom he would eventually marry and remain with for life -- played characters in thrall to his charm and charisma, usually to their detriment. The most beautiful actress he was ever cast opposite also happened to play the character he rebuffed most cruelly: Elizabeth Taylor's sex-starved Maggie, longing hopelessly for passion from his closeted gay Brick in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."
It's not the sort of thing you see much at the movies anymore -- the examination of the male bombshell, a character as irresistible as he is casually destructive to himself and others. It's hard to imagine a modern-day movie star putting his sex appeal to such complicated, fascinating use. Even when Newman's characters liked women, he wasn't very good to them. In "Hud," he tried to rape his housekeeper. In "The Hustler," he took up with a disabled alcoholic who, for a while, supported him. In "Sweet Bird of Youth," he hustled rich older women for money and an entree into show business, repeatedly abandoning the girl he loved to pursue his dream of stardom. In "Cool Hand Luke," where the only woman in sight was his mother, he broke her heart.
And yet the Paul Newman anti-hero, a rake if ever there was one, was irresistible to men and women alike. (What is "Cool Hand Luke" if not a polyamorous bromance writ large?) His early characters were at once vulpine and preyed upon; twice, in separate films, he uttered a variation of the line, "Everyone wants a piece of me." Newman was savvy enough to know when to start moving away from the roles that used his beauty as a basis for his characters. And that intelligence and grounded self-awareness shines through in all his performances. The slow Newman grin, the same one that charms George Kennedy in "Cool Hand Luke," made it clear that he was always aware of the effect he had on others, and when and how to modulate it for maximum impact.
His characters' vanity got them into worlds of trouble, but Newman's complete lack of it came across clearly in the roles he chose and the life he lived.
Da The Los Angeles Times, 28 Settembre 2008

Cool Hand Luke, The Verdict, Butch Cassidy, Absence of Malice, The Hustler
Today, as the world mourns the loss of Paul Newman, one of its greatest actors and philanthropists, I thought it would be fitting to seek out the memories of several of those who knew him longest and best: his friends, co-stars, and contemporaries from Hollywood's Golden Age, during which he began his remarkable career more than half a century ago.
After graduating from Kenyon College in 1949, Newman spent a year at Yale University's School of Drama, then decided to try his luck in New York. There, he enrolled at the Actors Studio and learned Method acting under the tutelage of Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, and Martin Ritt.
His classmates included future stars Marlon Brando, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Cliff Robertson, who would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for “Charly” (1968), and who today remembered how impressed he was with Newman even then.
“He was very, very likable, straightforward, and his word was his bond -- he was an honest man,” Robertson, now 85, told me Saturday morning. Robertson also recalled that, contrary to popular belief, success did not always come easily to Newman.

“In the beginning, he did some things that were not notable that would have finished some people's careers,” Robertson chuckled. “We go way back to ‘The Silver Chalice.' That was his first movie,” Robertson said of the 1954 film, which he noted could easily have been Newman's last.
"Silver Chalice" was part of a string of early Newman yawners on TV and film, but Newman broke the trend following the death of his friend James Dean in 1955. Shortly thereafter, Newman inherited two of Dean's upcoming roles -- boxer Rocky Graziano in “Somebody Up There Likes Me” (1956) and Billy the Kid in “The Left Handed Gun” (1958) -- and demonstrated more depth of character in both. Subsequently, Robertson recalls, “I was always impressed with his humility” and his “lovely family.”
Ernest Borgnine, who won the Academy Award for Best Actor for “Marty” (1955), came up in live television and film at about the same time as Newman, but only worked with him for the first time decades later in Hawaii on the film “When Time Ran Out” (1980). Borgnine, now 91, became emotional this morning as he reflected on Newman's passing: “What can you possibly say about such a wonderful, dedicated man? He was a great guy.” Like most people in and out of Hollywood, he said he learned of Newman's prolonged illness from “reading about it in the papers.”
“I feel he is much better off, God bless him," Borgnine said. "I feel so sorry for his wife, Joanne, who is just the most lovely person, too. But, hey, he left his mark, God bless him, and you can't say no more than that, by golly. He left not only that, but he left a wonderful thing that he'd been doing for everyone—I mean, donating all his money from different things that he's done to help children.”
Newman was often considered a guy's guy for gritty performances in films like “The Hustler” (1961), “Cool Hand Luke” (1967), and “Slap Shot” (1977), to say nothing of his pair of buddy films opposite Robert Redford, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) and “The Sting” (1973), or his off-screen love of speed racing. Female audiences also admired him, not only for his chiseled face and sea-blue eyes, but for being known as a genuinely good guy who remained married to the same woman, the Oscar-winning actress Joanne Woodward, for 50 years.
His female co-stars were known to uniformly adore him -- Elizabeth Taylor from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1958), Eva Marie Saint from “Exodus” (1960), and Piper Laurie from “The Hustler” (1961) have all spoken of how much they enjoyed working with him. So did Patricia Neal, the one leading lady who won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her work opposite him, for “Hud” (1963), when we spoke earlier this morning.
Patricia Neal, now 82, says she was at the beauty parlor when “somebody came in and told me that Paul had died, and I was heartbroken, because he was a beautiful man. I knew that he was a little ill, and I knew that he was probably going to die, but you know it's just so heartbreaking when one hears it.”
Neal says she will never forget the first time she met Newman, years before they ever appeared in a film together. She had just arrived at the Actors Studio for the first time, walked in, spotted Newman, “and I couldn't take my eyes off of him… I thought he was the most handsome thing I'd ever seen in my life.”
When they were reunited years later for “Hud,” under the direction of their former instructor Ritt, she says Newman was incredibly helpful, and that their off-screen friendship was the polar opposite of their characters' contentious on-screen relationship: “I loved Paul. He was a gorgeous actor, and a fabulous man, and so generous with me.”
Hollywood's beloved elder statesman Mickey Rooney, who just turned 88 and is, as Newman was, one of the last remaining greats, also offered his thoughts this morning. Rooney never worked with Newman and rarely crossed his path, but he says he always greatly admired him from afar, and counts a number of his films -- “Butch Cassidy,” “The Verdict,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and “The Long, Hot Summer” -- among his personal favorites.
As an actor, Rooney says “[Newman] was great, he was unforgettable, and I think that's the treasure that he leaves.” Moreover, he adds, “his character was great -- he was a gentleman, and he was kind, and considerate.”
Asked what he thinks Newman's legacy will be, Rooney paused for a moment and then said, “I don't emulate anybody; Paul didn't either. We're all individuals, and it's just something that you have or you haven't got—and he had it.”
Da The Los Angeles Times, 28 Settembre 2008

Eppure lui non si piaceva come attore Pagò un annuncio sul giornale per scusarsi col pubblico de Il calice d'argento Con Butch Cassidy e La stangata in coppia con Redford scrive la sua leggenda L'Oscar arriva nell'87 per Il colore dei soldi.
Il mito si è spento giovedì scorso a 83 anni Paul Newman. Da tempo malato di cancro ai polmoni, l'attore aveva chiesto, mesi fa, di poter tornare a casa dove ha trascorso gli ultimi giorni con la moglie Joanne Woodward e le figlie.
Se avete in casa il dvd di Cars - sì, quel cartone animato sulle automobili - perché l'avete regalato ai vostri bambini, infilatelo nel lettore e ascoltatelo in lingua originale. La voce di Doc - l'ex campione, la vecchia auto da corsa - è la sua. Lui ci scherzava («Ho iniziato la carriera con una conferenza sulla pessima recitazione e l'ho finita con il ruolo di un'automobile») ma sotto sotto quel cartone doveva essergli piaciuto, perché era un appassionato di corse e nel'79 era arrivato secondo alla 24 ore di Le Mans: un podio al quale probabilmente teneva più che all'Oscar.
Ora che ci ha lasciati, sappiamo che sulla sua tomba non verrà scritta la frase alla quale lui stesso aveva pensato: «Qui giace Paul Newman, morto di dolore perché i suoi occhi erano diventati marroni». Gli occhi sono rimasti azzurri fino all'ultimo, e Newman era, anche dopo gli 80 anni, un vecchio bellissimo. Di lui Lee Strasberg, il suo maestro all'Actor's Studio, diceva: «Se fosse stato meno bello sarebbe stato più bravo di Marlon Brando». Una frase che ricorda quella che George Best, il «quinto Beatle», il famoso calciatore del Manchester United, diceva di sé: «Se fossi stato meno bello non avreste mai sentito parlare di Pelè». È curioso come i belli, a volte, fatichino a fare i conti con la propria bellezza. Newman raccontava di aver capito l'effetto che faceva alle donne durante le riprese di Hud il selvaggio, in Texas, nel 1963: «Tentavano letteralmente di scavalcare la recinzione del motel dove abitavo. All'inizio, è gratificante. Ma solo all'inizio... poi capisci che ti confondono con i ruoli che interpreti, e che tutto ciò non ha niente a che vedere con il vero te stesso». Ciò non toglie che per decenni Paul Newman è stato uno dei divi più «redditizi» di Hollywood, e che in questo successo il fascino sia stato importante almeno quanto il talento. Lui, però, aveva un pessimo rapporto con il proprio alter-ego, là sullo schermo: «Non riesco a guardarmi. Se mi rivedo in una scena osservo solo la tecnica, gli errori, la fatica che mi è costata».

È una fatica che risale agli inizi della carriera. Paul Newman non è stato attore per vocazione, non era quel che si dice «un talento naturale». Figlio di un negoziante di articoli sportivi, nasce a Cleveland, Ohio, il 26 gennaio del 1925. Dopo aver servito in Marina (come marconista) durante la guerra, lavora nel negozio paterno e vive una gioventù turbolenta: espulso dall'università, nel 1950 ha già un figlio, un matrimonio compromesso e un sacco di voglie matte in testa. All'inizio degli anni 50, già grandicello, ritenta con gli studi: si iscrive a Yale, frequenta la compagnia teatrale universitaria e tenta la fortuna a New York. Nel'53 ottiene il ruolo da protagonista nel dramma Picnic di William Inge ed entra all'Actor's Studio per caso: accompagna un'amica che ha bisogno di un partner per un'audizione, come a volte capita non prendono lei e notano lui. Ma fin da allora, ha raccontato, la recitazione per Newman non è gioia ma lavoro, duro lavoro: una dolorosa terapia per superare le proprie insicurezze.
Il passaggio al cinema è traumatico. La «conferenza sulla pessima recitazione» di cui parlavamo in apertura è il modo in cui Newman descrive il proprio esordio, nel 1954, in Il calice d'argento, pessimo film in costume sul Santo Graal diretto da Victor Saville. II giovane Paul è così deluso dalla propria performance che paga di tasca propria un annuncio su un giornale per scusarsi con gli spettatori. Ma è solo questione di tempo. Il cinema americano, alla metà degli anni 50, sta cambiando. Sotto i colpi della tv, il vecchio studio-system hollywoodiano perde centralità. Si diffonde un nuovo gusto, piacciono facce diverse, meno da «star», più vicine alla gente reale. Una nuova generazione di attori sta per imporsi: vengono dal teatro, sono seguaci del Metodo (quello che Strasberg insegna all'Actor's Studio, ispirandosi alla tecnica del russo Stanislavskij), lavorano duramente sull'identificazione psicologica, portano nel cinema le inquietudini e le ribellioni giovanili del dopoguerra. Uno di loro, già famosissimo in teatro, è un divo del cinema dal'48: Montgomery Clift, esordiente «alla pari» con John Wayne nel meraviglioso western II fiume rosso, di Howard Hawks. Un altro, Marlon Brando, ha fatto il botto nel 1951 portando sugli schermi Un tram che si chiama desiderio. Un terzo, James Dean, esplode come una meteora due-tre anni dopo: tre film (La valle dell'Eden, Gioventù bruciata, Il gigante) e una morte che lo consegna alla leggenda. Intanto Newman suda, fatica, arranca. Ma il secondo film, nel'56, è decisivo: il ruolo del pugile italo-americano Rocky Graziano si presta ai supplizi fisici e psicologici che il giovane attore si infligge. Il film, Lassù qualcuno mi ama, è un successo. Newman, lavorando con Graziano che è poco più anziano di lui (del '22, campione del mondo dei medi tra il '47 e il '48), scopre che il pugile, un paio d'anni prima, è stato perseguitato da un altro giovane attore che voleva «studiarlo» per interpretarne la vita: «Si chiamava Marlon Brando, lo conosci?». Anche da questa coincidenza, Newman capisce di aver scelto il cavallo giusto. Fa di Rocky un giovane chiuso e disadattato, che attraverso la violenza esprime rabbia e bisogno di amore. Qualcosa di simile fa, due anni dopo, interpretando Billy the Kid in Furia selvaggia, di Arthur Penn, il western più psicoanalitico della storia: una rilettura molto «newyorkese» del celebre fuorilegge, non a caso tratta da un dramma di Gore Vidal che con il vero West aveva ben poco a che fare.
Il '58 è l'anno in cui Newman diventa un divo: interpreta, oltre a Furia selvaggia, La lunga estate calda (nel quale ritrova un'attrice già conosciuta in teatro, Joanne Woodward: non si lasceranno mai più) e La gatta sul tetto che scotta, da Tennessee Williams, dove ingaggia con Liz Taylor un rovente duello di sensualità. Otto Preminger lo chiama nel '60 per Exodus: «È l'unico attore ebreo che non sembra ebreo», dice. Sì, Newman - i cui genitori vengono entrambi dall'Ungheria - è ebreo al 50%, anche se non ha mai pubblicizzato troppo questa sua origine. Nel '61 Robert Rossen, un regista da riscoprire, gli regala uno dei suoi ruoli più belli, il giovane Eddie Felson che sogna di sfidare a biliardo il campione Minnesota Fats: il film è Lo spaccone, ammirato e citato da tutti gli appassionati della stecca, anche dal Francesco Nuti di lo Chiara e lo Scuro. Seguono Hud il selvaggio, Detective's Story, Nick Mano Fredda e gli amatissimi Butch Cassidy e La stangata, entrambi di George Roy Hill, dove forma con Robert Redford una coppia irripetibile. Sono i film che, negli anni 60, scrivono la sua leggenda. Comincia a collezionare candidature agli Oscar: sono già 7, senza nessuna vittoria, quando finalmente vince nel 1987 per Il colore dei soldi, seguito -infinitamente inferiore - dello Spaccone. Forse per scaramanzia, non si presenta alla cerimonia, e in seguito dichiara: «E come inseguire una bella donna per 80 anni, e quando lei finalmente cede, doverle dire: mi spiace, sono stanco».
Man mano che gli anni passano, i ruoli si evolvono: anziché il giovane bello ma autistico, incapace di trovare un posto nel mondo, comincia ad interpretare uomini maturi, a volte quasi saggi, come Butch Cassidy e l'Henry Gondorff della Stangata - e in quegli stessi anni sono indimenticabili le sue prove in Un uomo oggi, L'uomo dai 7 capestri (stranissimo western grottesco di John Huston) e Agente speciale Macintosh. Èbello pensare che la svolta della carriera sia una giornata molto particolare descritta da Hill in un «dietro le quinte» di Butch Cassidy: «Per mesi avevamo pensato che Brando avrebbe interpretato Butch, e Newman il più giovane Sundance Kid. Quando Brando rinunciò e fu scritturato Redford, la nuova distribuzione dei ruoli non fu chiarita, e al primo giorno di prove Newman cominciò a leggere la parte del Kid, e Redford quella di Butch. Dovetti dir loro: scusate ragazzi ma avevamo pensato il contrario, Paul fa Butch e Robert fa il Kid». Da quell'equivoco Robert Redford ha ricavato il Sundance Festival... e Newman, chissà, una nuova consapevolezza, una dimensione di «uomo fatto» che prima era incompiuta, e che lo aveva reso perfetto in ruoli da emarginato, da violento controvoglia, da reietto. Dopo, invece, vengono parti sempre problematiche, ma con una nuova, potente solennità, come l'avvocato del Verdetto, Il poliziotto di Fort Apache: the Bronx, e naturalmente l'Eddie Felson invecchiato, capace di tenere a bada il giovane fan Tom Cruise, nel citato Il colore dei soldi.
Nel frattempo Newman si è rivelato anche un bravo regista. Ha diretto 5 film: Rachel, Rachel (1968), Sfida senza paura (1971), L'effetto dei raggi gamma sulle margherite (1972), Harry&Son (1984) e Zoo di vetro (1987), dal dramma di Tennessee Williams. Sono molto diversi l'uno dall'altro e testimoniano soprattutto un affettuoso lavoro sugli attori, si tratti dell'adorata Joanne Woodward o del sommo Henry Fonda (lui e Newman interpretano due fratelli nel durissimo Sfida senza paura, forse il più inatteso e interessante del mazzo). Dagli anni 70 Newman si confronta anche con la Nuova Hollywood, interpretando un cialtronissimo William Cody in Buffalo Bill e gli indiani di Altman e arrivando fino a Mister Hula-Hoop dei fratelli Coen. L'ultimo, vero film è Era mio padre di Sam Mendes, ennesima candidatura (la decima) all'Oscar.
Tre ultime cose. È sempre stato un convinto sostenitore del partito Democratico ed era orgoglioso che il suo nome comparisse nella lista dei «nemici» di Richard Nixon ai tempi del Watergate. Ha avuto un enorme successo con la linea di prodotti alimentari «Newman's Own»: gli ha fruttato, negli anni, circa 200 milioni di dollari andati tutti, dicasi tutti, in beneficenza. E nonostante la leggenda, non era un tappo. Quando lo vedemmo da 3-4 metri di distanza a Cannes, l'anno in cui presentò Zoo di vetro, ci sembrò alto come noi. II sito internet www.imdb.com indica un'altezza di 1,77. Chi scrive è 1,76. Un centimetro fa la differenza.
Da L'Unità, 28 settembre 2008

Come accade tuttora per Steve McQueen, la pubblicità sfrutterà a lungo lo sguardo azzurro di Paul Newman, morto ieri a 83 anni, dopo un'agonia fin troppo seguita dalla stampa e una vita esaltata tanto dal successo (e da quello di Joanne Woodward, seconda moglie); quanto amareggiata dalla scomparsa di Scott, figlio di primo letto.
Nella filantropia concreta degli ultimi anni di Newman non c'era solo la. Voglia di trovare un'alternativa alla passione per le corse in auto, che lo aveva portato in pista- a Le. Mans e a Indianapolis. Doveva esserci anche il dolore venato di rimorso di un padre capace di dare al figlio dalla gloria riflessa ai soldi sicuri, ma non ciò ché il figlio voleva di più: tempo e considerazione del padre.
Le tv hanno già cominciato a .spartirsi il ricordo: di Newman, a colpi di «omaggi», modo finto-nobile per trarre nuovi introiti indiretti dall'aver acquisito i diritti dei sui vecchi film. Era quel-lo che Newman meno desiderava: non molti anni fa aveva pubblicato un'intera pagina su un quotidiano di Los Angeles per scusarsi della ripetuta diffusione del Calice d'argento di Victor Saville, scadente esordio-cinematografico, dove Anna Maria Pierangeli (solo Pier Angeli per gli americani) interpretava sua moglie.

Fra questi episodi estremi, mezzo secolo di carriera e una settantina di film, da attore nella Hollywood dell'ultimo divismo, per lo più girati fra anni Cinquanta e Settanta; numericamente'esigue e ignote al grosso pubblico, invece, le regie, di Newman. Ma l'ultìmo Festival di Cannes -'nel quarantennale sessantottardo - ha riproposto Gli effetti dei raggi gamma sui fiori di Matilda, dove c'è tutto, meno la «fantasia al potere» e il «vietato vietare» della contestazione francese.
L'alone del divo ha messo in ombra l'intellettuale, il marito felice (quanti a Hollywood hanno avuto una sola moglie?) e il padre infelice (stesso destino di Coppola e Pollack). Ogni commemorazione è tenuta a evocare splendori; e ogni commemorazione, specie in tv, evocherà ardori femminili estesi a quattro generazioni. E noli solo quelli femminili: virile pugile in Lassù qualcuno mi ama di Robert Wise, uno dei suoi film migliori, sempre accanto alla Pierangeli, Newman interpretava - due anni dopo cioè mezzo secolo prima dei Segreti di Brokeback Mountain - non solo il pistolero omosessuale Billy the Kid in Furia selvaggia di Arthur Penn, ma anche il ricco marito «indifferente» alle grazie di Elizabeth Taylor nella Gatta sul tetto che scotta di Richard Brooks, tratto dal dramma di Tennessee Williams.
Era la prima fase della carriera di Newman, ancora d'impronta teatrale e pericolosamente simile a quella dell'archetipo, Marlon Brando, dei belli e dannati del periodo. Uscire da quella scia è stato uno dei problemi di Newman: non ci è mai riuscito dal lato mitico, ma ci è riuscito, da quello economico perché quasi tutti i suoi film incassavano, a differenza di quelli con Brando. E se nei drammi Brando era superiore, nelle commedie prevaleva Newman: i begli occhi: lo rendevano irresistibile come simpatico mascalzone, perfino quando dovevano confrontarsi con quelli, sempre azzurri ma meno vivaci; di Robert Redford, come in Butch Cassidy di George Roy Hill, dove l'omoerotismo della vicenda si diluiva nella terza misura di seno di Katherine Ross, il cui personaggio si concedeva serenamente a entrambi.
Sono rari i film dove i ruoli di Newman prescindano dalla seduzione. La questione poteva essere camuffata in peggio, come appioppandogli il ruolo del violentatore, come nell'Oltraggio di Martin Ritt, vano rifacimento di Rashomon di Akira Kurosawa; o quello del maturo capobanda assassino nell'Uomo dai sette capestri di John Huston (scritto da John Milius), mettendogli accanto per pochi attimi un altro grande mito sexy della sua stessa generazione: Ava Gardner.
Una Academy ancora poco incline ad apprezzare i personaggi problematici si trovò fuori sincrono - con l'apice della carriera di Newman: solo quando lui era già sessantenne, gli diede dunque l'Oscar per Il colore dei soldi di Martin Scorsese, rifacimento non proprio magistrale dello Spaccone di Robert Rossen, quello sì un capolavoro grazie anche a un immenso Newman. Si noti: fra i comprimari dello Spaccone c'era Jake La Motta, che a Scorsese avrebbe poi ispirato Toro scatenato.
Newman aveva a quel punto una dimensione che prescindeva anche dai riconoscimenti prestigiosi. Una della scene più famose, in uno dei film di maggiore incasso d'ogni tempo, Emmanuelle di Just Jaeckin, schierava le ventenni Sylvia Kristel e Christine Boisson a contemplare con ritorni molto, - molto piacevoli per loro - Newman sulla copertina di una rivista. Un quarto di secolo dopo, nella miglior versione (non dichiarata) del Lungo addio di Raymond Chandler; Twilight («Crepuscolo») di Robert Benton, saranno nel personaggio di Susan Sarandon intensi pensieri adulterini su un Newman ormai settantenne. Era sesso, solo accennato, adeguato alla seconda età per lei e alla terza di lui, che aggirava la convenzione hollywoodiana per la quale il vecchio con desideri è un vecchio porco. Per violare certi tabù non bastava esser (stati) belli; occorreva anche esser bravi. Ricordiamo dunque così Newman, in quel ruolo da dorato crepuscolo; e nel ruolo colpevole e sofferente di Era mio padre di Sani Mendes, dove aveva accettato, come per espiazione, il suo solo personaggio atroce: un padre che condanna il degno figlio (putativo) per salvare quello indegno.
Da Il Giornale, 28 settembre 2008

L'attrice girò con lui Ormai non c'e più scampo. «Un brutto film, lo accettai solo per rivederlo. La moglie, Joanne Woodward, lo teneva sempre d'occhio»
Valentina Cortese si schermisce con grazia. «Sto male - dichiara con la sua piccola voce che ha incantato generazioni di spettatori -, un mese fa, mentre riordinavo un vecchio armadio dove avevo riposto un baule di Eleonora Duse in cui la nostra straordinaria attrice aveva messo i copioni originali di D'Annunzio, sono caduta e mi sono fratturata una vertebra. Un incidente che mi ha costretta a rinviare il recital Duse legge i versi di Gabriele che avrei dovuto recitare al Teatro di Verdura, il palcoscenico del mio amico Dell'Utri». Impossibile arginare Valentina che, nonostante un noiosissimo raffreddore, parla a raffica di D'Annunzio, di Boito e della Duse come se li avesse conosciuti personalmente.

Ma io interrompo quel flusso precipitoso di parole per darle la drammatica notizia della scomparsa del suo amico Paul Newman. Per un attimo, d'improvviso, la sua voce al telefono tace. Si sente solo, in sordina, un fastidiosissimo sibilo che mi lascia interdetto. Possibile che la Cortese, in preda all'angoscia, abbia interrotto la comunicazione? Per fortuna, invece, non c'è nulla da temere. E subito Valentina, con le lacrime nella voce, comincia a tessere, addoloratissima, uno di quei meravigliosi monologhi di cui lei sola è capace. «Quando è avvenuto?», chiede disperata. «lo che qui, mentre a stento mi riprendo, chiudo la radio e spengo la televisione, non ho sentito nulla. Anche se noi tutti che l'abbiamo tanto amalo, ci aspettavamo da. un momento all'altro che dovesse accadere».
Come lo ricorda, cara Valentina, lei che con lui tanto tempo fa recitò in un fïlmone catastrofico intitolato Ormai non c'è più scampo?
«Accettai di girare quella brutta pellicola, che per fortuna oggi nessuno ricorda, solo per avere il piacere di rivederlo».
Dove vi eravate conosciuti?
«A Hollywood, vent'anni prima, quando ero io America al soldo di Selznick. Ltd, allora, era legato da un contratto di ferro con la Metro Goldwyn Mayer che lo obbligava a recitare in copioni così brutti da fargli venire conati di vomito, povero caro. Una sera alcuni amici comuni ci presentarono. Stavamo entrambi cenando da Ciro's, il ristorante chic di Santa Monica, e Paul si lamentava con Anna Maria Pierangeli del film in citi lavoravano insieme, un pasticcio biblico intitolato Il calice d'argento. "Ma come -ripeteva indignato -, a me che ho studiato all'Actor's Studio e mi son fatto le ossa a Broadway, il cinema offre porcherie simili". A me quel bellissimo ragazzo dai grandi occhi azzurro cielo fece subito un'immensa tenerezza. "Non preoccuparti, caro - cercai di consolarlo -, prima o poi, verrà il tuo momento. E allora tutta Hollywood striscerò ai tuoi piedi, puoi starne certo"».
Possibile che dopo vi siate perduti di vista per tanto tempo?
«Capita spesso nel nostro mondo, purtroppo. Anche se di tanto in tanto ci mandavamo dei bigliettini d'incoraggiamento. Pensi che quando, per un soffio, non vinsi l'Oscar per Effetto notte, il film di Truffaut dov'ero un'attrice che andava sempre a sbattere contro una porta come in una comica di Ridolini, lui che l'Oscar non l'aveva preso mai mi telegrafò. "Chi è più geniale di Buster Keaton - mi scrisse - non ha bisogno di premi di consolazione". Una. battuta che in sé riassume tutta la storia di un'amicizia».
Poi finalmente giraste insieme quell'unico film. Che cosa ricorda di quel periodo?
«Lavoravamo alle Hawaii. In piena estate, con cinquanta gradi all'ombra. Per distrarci andavamo a nutrire i delfini all'Animal Circle, a due passi dalla spiaggia dove avevano luogo le riprese. È alla sera, in compagnia di sua moglie,Manne Woodward, che lo teneva d'occhio come un'istitutrice svizzera, mangiavamo chili di pop corn che lui stesso si divertiva a preparare. Con lui non ho perso soltanto on grande amico. Con Paul se ne va l'ultima traccia della mia giovinezza».
Da Il Giornale, 27 settembre 2008