"Kid, the next time I say, "Let's go someplace like Bolivia," let's GO someplace like Bolivia"
"PAUL NEWMAN | 1925-2008
Blue-eyed idol put an indelible stamp on movies, philanthropy
Paul Newman, the matinee idol, race car driver, and philanthropist whose cool, rebellious charm made him one of his generation's greatest movie stars and finest actors, died Friday at his farmhouse near Westport, Conn., after a long battle with cancer, according to publicist Jeff Sanderson. He was surrounded by family and close friends.
Mr. Newman was 83. It is impossible to overstate Mr. Newman's importance to the popular culture of the 1950s through 1980s.
Paul Leonard Newman was born in a Cleveland suburb to a Jewish father and a Hungarian Catholic mother. His early years were spent finding new ways to avoid living up to expectations: He was kicked out of Ohio University after he dented a dean's car with a beer keg.
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Enlisting in the Navy in 1943, Mr. Newman failed to get his pilot's license - ironically, those famous blue eyes were color blind. Instead, he served out World War II as a radioman third class, and then went to Kenyon College on the GI Bill....
"Cool Hand Luke," with Mr. Newman eating 50 eggs on a dare and prompting Strother Martin as a Southern prison warden to drawl, "What we got here is a failure to communicate." On the contrary, Luke's insouciant resistance to authority communicated to the growing counterculture, even if audiences missed the nuanced layers of self-loathing....
In 1969, he embarked on a partnership with more lasting pop culture impact. "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" paired Mr. Newman with a younger actor, Robert Redford, and treated historical Wild West characters with appealing irreverence. The film was a massive hit, as was the duo's re-teaming four years later in the 1973 Best Picture winner, "The Sting," playing a pair of 1930s con men.
Around this time, Mr. Newman began to let his progressive political views be known in words, deeds, and movies. The actor stumped for Eugene McCarthy at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and starred in and co-produced the 1970 film "WUSA," a caustic drama about a conservative radio station. In 1978, President Carter appointed the actor a US delegate to a UN conference on nuclear disarmament, and in later years Mr. Newman was co-owner and occasional contributor to the left-wing magazine The Nation.
"My single highest honor," he told Time magazine in 1982, "is that I was No. 19 on Nixon's enemies list. All the other actors were so jealous."
Film director Bill Haney of Wayland recalled receiving checks for "thousands and thousands" of dollars from Newman, whom he had never met, to help fund a charity he created to help poor women in Latin America.
About two years ago, Haney said his phone rang and Newman was on the other end. Newman said he liked Haney's film "A Passion for the Wild" and wanted to know what he was working on next. Haney told him about his plans for the film, "The Price of Sugar," which chronicled worker abuses by sugar plantation owners in South America. Newman immediately offered to narrate it for free.
Haney said he warned Newman that "some people won't like us making the movie because powerful people don't like to be questioned." Haney said Newman replied, "That's exactly why we have to question them."
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Haney also recalled that after he finished the film and let Newman view it, Newman said, "I don't think you're tough enough on them," the plantation owners. "He was powerful; he knew what he believed in," Haney said.
The late 1970s saw a rough patch in the filmography - "The Towering Inferno" was the biggest hit, while the profane hockey comedy "Slap Shot" was probably the best movie - but the 1980s saw some of Mr. Newman's finest work. He powerfully played a common man smeared by the media in Sydney Pollack's "Absence of Malice," (1981) and his role as an alcoholic Boston attorney in Sidney Lumet's "The Verdict" the following year stands as the actor's professional peak. He was nominated for a best actor Academy Award for the latter film; it remains the Oscar he should have won.
And the Verdict, Mr. Galvin...?"You know, so much of the time we're lost. We say, 'Please, God, tell us what is right. Tell us what's true. There is no justice. The rich win, the poor are powerless...' We become tired of hearing people lie. After a time we become dead. A little dead. We start thinking of ourselves as victims. (pause) And we become victims. (pause) And we become weak...and doubt ourselves, and doubt our institutions...and doubt our beliefs...we say for example, 'The law is a sham...there is no law...I was a fool for having believed there was.' (beat) But today you are the law. You are the law...And not some book and not the lawyers, or the marble statues and the trappings of the court...all that they are is symbols. (beat) Of our desire to be just... (beat) All that they are, in effect, is a prayer...(beat) ... a fervent, and a frightened prayer. In my religion we say, `Act as if you had faith, and faith will be given to you.' (beat) If. If we would have faith in justice, we must only believe in ourselves. (beat) And act with justice. (beat) And I believe that there is justice in our hearts. (beat) Thank you."
(And a moment of silence, remembrance, and thanks for your tremendous contribution to our culture, Frank)
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