Legendary Actor And Race Car Driver Paul Newman Dies At 83
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Sep 27, 2008
paulnewman.com
Paul Newman, the Academy-Award winning superstar who personified cool as an activist, race car driver, popcorn impresario and the anti-hero of such films as “Hud,” “Cool Hand Luke” and “The Color of Money,” has died. He was 83.
Newman died Friday after a long battle with cancer at his farmhouse near Westport, publicist Jeff Sanderson said. He was surrounded by his family and close friends.
He got his start in theater and on television during the 1950s, and went on to become one of the world’s most enduring and popular film stars, a legend held in awe by his peers. He was nominated for Oscars 10 times, winning one regular award and two honorary ones, and had major roles in more than 50 motion pictures, including “Exodus,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Verdict,” “The Sting” and “Absence of Malice.”
Newman worked with some of the greatest directors of the past half century, from Alfred Hitchcock and John Huston to Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers. His co-stars included Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Bacall, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks and, most famously, Robert Redford, his sidekick in “Butch Cassidy” and “The Sting.”
Newman was always fairly dismissive of his acting ability, considering himself “an untuned piano”. He claimed never to read his own notices on the grounds that favourable ones would turn his head, while bad ones would leave him depressed for weeks. Many times he admitted to being bored with acting so he looked for a parallel interest and found it, surprisingly, in motor racing.
It was a sport he had had to learn for his 1972 film Winning. He found it to his liking and took it up initially on an amateur basis. Within five years, he had won enough cups and trophies to turn semi-professional. In 1979, he and his team came second in the Le Mans contest. He was still racing at 70 and in 1995, was a winner in the gruelling 24-hour Daytona Beach car race.
“Racing is the best way I know to get away from all the rubbish of Hollywood,” he told People magazine in 1979.
Newman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the second of two boys of Arthur S. Newman, a partner in a sporting goods store, and Theresa Fetzer Newman.
He was raised in the affluent suburb of Shaker Heights, where he was encouraged him to pursue his interest in the arts by his mother and his uncle Joseph Newman, a well-known Ohio poet and journalist.
Following World War II service in the Navy, he enrolled at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where he got a degree in English and was active in student productions.
