Paul Newman

Paul Newman (1925-2008), American actor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist who won an Academy Award for his role in The Color of Money (1986). Newman had received seven Oscar nominations before winning the best actor award in 1986. The previous year, however, he was given an honorary award “in recognition of his many and memorable compelling screen performances.” In 1994 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented him with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in recognition of his charitable work.

Newman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended Kenyon College. He started acting in high school, played in summer stock theater after college, and studied at the Yale School of Drama and the Actors Studio. After a successful Broadway debut in William Inge’s Picnic in 1953, Newman signed a film contract with Warner Bros. but briefly returned to the Broadway stage to play in Joseph Hayes’s The Desperate Hours. He won critical acclaim for his portrayal of boxer Rocky Graziano in the film Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) and was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), based on the play by Tennessee Williams.

Some of Newman’s finest films were made in the 1960s, including The Hustler (1961), Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), Hud (1963), Harper (1966), Hombre (1967), and Cool Hand Luke (1967). He directed his wife, Joanne Woodward, in Rachel, Rachel (1968) and was executive producer of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), featuring himself and Robert Redford—a film that at the time was the highest-grossing Western in movie history. Newman and Redford’s second film together, The Sting (1973), won the Academy Award for best picture.

Starting in the late 1970s Newman began to play older and less idealized characters, enhancing his reputation as an accomplished actor in such films as Slap Shot (1977), Absence of Malice (1981), and The Verdict (1982). In the mid-1980s he won an Academy Award for his role as the aging pool shark Fast Eddie Felson in The Color of Money, an older version of the cocky young character he played in The Hustler. In 1987 Newman directed Woodward in a film remake of Tennessee Williams’s play The Glass Menagerie. He also appeared in films such as Blaze (1989); Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990, with Woodward); The Hudsucker Proxy (1994); and Nobody’s Fool (1994), for which he was voted best actor by the New York Film Critics Circle. Newman’s later motion pictures included Twilight (1998), Where the Money Is (2000), and Road to Perdition (2002), his last starring role, in which he played a crime boss. In 2005 he appeared in the two-part television miniseries Empire Falls, based on a novel by Richard Russo.

In 1982 Newman began to market his recipes for spaghetti sauce and salad dressing under the “Newman’s Own” label. The company gradually extended its product line, and Newman donated all profits from the business—more than $250 million—to various charities. In 1988 Newman opened a camp in Connecticut for children with cancer and other serious illnesses. It grew into an association of camps known as the “Hole-in-the-Wall Gang.”