Paul Newman’s death leaves Hollywood minus a legend

He was Butch Cassidy, Billy the Kid, Buffalo Bill, Cool Hand Luke, “Fast Eddie” Felson, Brick, Hud, Hombre, Harper and one half of “The Sting.” More recently, he was the voice of Doc Hudson in the Pixar hit “Cars” (2006).
An entrepreneur, philanthropist, race-car driver, 10-time Oscar nominee and epitome of the modern American rebel and anti-hero, he was the actor Paul Newman, who died Friday at age 83.
If Hollywood stars are our era’s gods and goddesses, Paul Newman was the 20th-century’s Adonis, an actor so good-looking it was freaky. Once, a rumor circulated that he injected dye into his corneas to get that trademark cornflower blue.
The Ohio-born Academy Award-winning leading man was indeed so handsome it blinded many to how talented he was. The accepted wisdom on Newman is that he got better as he got older.
Nonsense. If you could get past his looks, he was a great actor from the start. Just take a look at his Cannes Award-winning turn as the cunning, sexually aggressive Ben Quick in Martin Ritt’s “The Long, Hot Summer” (1958).
While he reportedly took out an ad in Variety to apologize for “The Silver Chalice” (1954), the lurid sword-and-sandal epic that was his feature debut, Newman was memorable even in that, demonstrating gravitas and charisma, although he soon left the Bible-movie field to Charlton Heston.
Educated at Yale Drama School and the Actors Studio, Newman toiled like all actors of his generation beneath the shadow of the great Marlon Brando. Newman made an admittedly Brando-esque early mark in Robert Wise’s 1956 sports drama “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” playing the troubled boxing champ Rocky Graziano, an earlier type of the Jake La Motta of “Raging Bull.”
The actor then exploded like a supernova in three 1958 films: the aforementioned “The Long, Hot Summer,” Arthur Penn’s “The Left Handed Gun,” as Billy the Kid, and opposite Elizabeth Taylor in the steamy Tennessee Williams-based “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Newman, who also played the male lead in“Sweet Bird of Youth” (1962), would later direct his wife Joanne Woodward in a hit 1987 production of Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie.”
After the screen soap operas “The Young Philadelphians” (1959) and “From the Terrace” (1960), the actor gave another trademark performance in Robert Rossen’s “The Hustler” opposite Jackie Gleason, George C. Scott and Piper Laurie. He continued his collaboration with director Ritt (“The Long, Hot Summer”) in “Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man” (1962), the acclaimed drama “Hud” (1963), “The Outrage” (1964), and in one of my favorite Elmore Leonard Westerns, “Hombre” (1967).
Newman first directed his wife, Woodward, in “Rachel, Rachel” (1968) to critical acclaim and teamed with Robert Redford for two of the screen’s pop classics - George Roy Hill’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) and “The Sting” (1973). Working again with Hill, Newman played an aging hockey player in the comic gem “Slap Shot” (1977).
The actor collaborated with many of the greatest directors of his time: In addition to Wise, Ritt, Hill and Rossen, Alfred Hitchcock (“Torn Curtain”), Sidney Lumet (“The Verdict”), Otto Preminger (“Exodus”), Robert Altman (“Buffalo Bill and the Indians”), James Ivory (“Mr. and Mrs. Bridge”), Sydney Pollack (“Absence of Malice”), warhammer gold Martin Scorsese (Newman’s Academy Award-winning turn in “The Color of Money”), John Huston (“The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean”), Joel and Ethan Coen (“The Hudsucker Proxy”) and Sam Mendes (“Road to Perdition”).
He brought Ross Macdonald’s gumshoe Lew Harper to life in “Harper” (1966) and “The Drowning Pool” (1975). Newman helmed “Sometimes a Great Notion” (1971), one of my favorite obscure films of the ’70s, a neglected Ken Kesey-penned drama about a family of Oregon loggers, co-starring Newman, Henry Fonda and Lee Remick.buy warhammer gold
I was lucky enough to meet Newman years ago in Boston when I was covering the press junket for the great Boston-shot drama “The Verdict,” in which he delivers a colossal performance as an alcoholic Irish-Catholic attorney seeking redemption.
Let’s just say I was in awe.warhammer gold
Actors we admire, male and female, become a part of our spiritual family. Today, that family is in mourning.wow power leveling