The new Paul Newman thread

[mivona]

I thought it was amazing how he stayed married for 50 years.

I loved the way he donated all his food profits to charity. What a great thing to do!

I thought it was fantastic how he was so engaged with life, his family, his racing, as well as being an actor.

[lakelady]

RIP Paul.

[Meya]

The last movie I saw him in was "Empire Falls". It's a great HBO movie if you've not seen it. Joanne was in it too.

His long marriage is a testament to them both. We've made it 31 years and are going for the long haul. I didn't follow his politics, but admired his charity work. And those blue eyes...ah!

[kim]

i wonder if his daughter will continue making his line of products i hope so i really like his bleu cheese dressing (100% of that money went to charity) he was a good one...

- rip paul...

[krisinluck]

I'm going to move the posts from the other thread over here, but in order to do it right I have to post them myself as quotes. They should be here too.

[krisinluck]

From the other thread:Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssConsumerGoodsAndRetailNews/idUSN2732677420080927)WASHINGTON, Sept 27 (Reuters) - Legendary film star Paul Newman, whose brilliant blue eyes, good looks and talent made him one of Hollywood's top actors over six decades, has died, a spokesman said on Saturday. He was 83 and had been battling cancer.

[krisinluck]

From the other thread:He probably couldn't bear the prospect of watching the vice-presidential debate...

Seriously, it is sad that he has died, but he had a good and long life.

[krisinluck]

From the other thread:You're right, miv. He had a good life, which is what counts at the end. He also gave back, through his charity. It's sad he's gone, though.

[krisinluck]

From the other thread:His political activism and charity work puts him in a really good place, I am sure.

[krisinluck]

From the other thread:Rest in peace, Paul. You were a remarkable man.

[krisinluck]

From the other thread:Ah, shit.

The last photo I saw of him looked bad, and I wondered how long he'd last. But still...another icon gone is hard to take.

RIP, Paul. You'll always been Butch Cassidy to me.

[krisinluck]

From the other thread:The political joke was apropos...Paul Newman was a long-time liberal activist.

And it most assuredly IS sad that he is dead, but he did have a spectacularly good life...and a long one.

[krisinluck]

When Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid came out, I was four years old. It was my *favorite* movie, because of course in those days we didn't have 800 channels on the television and movies were different than they are today.

I watched it as often as I could get my mom to take me to the drive in. I called it the Raindrop movie, because of the theme song; that was the first song that played on the radio that I learned every single word to.

I've watched it often as an adult if I'm lucky enough to catch it on TV...I'm a big Redford fan, having seen The Way We Were at a - shall we say - formative age. lol But both of them were awesome, and I have never seen Paul Newman in anything that I didn't think Butch Cassidy when he was on screen.

[toke]

I loved him in Hombre and Long Hot Summer and Cool Hand Luke. Oh, my. Aside from his other fine qualities, the man was very, very hot. :)

[toke]

Here's a wonderful column by Maureen Dowd on the incomparable Newman...

October 1, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Cool Hand Paul
By MAUREEN DOWD

Paul Newman taught me how to peel a cucumber.

My eating habits were so bad for many years that I didn’t actually know the intricacies of making a salad. So when the man who has made $250 million for charity with Newman’s Own dressings and sauces asked me to help him make a salad in 1986, while I was writing a profile of him for The Times Magazine, I mangled my cucumber so thoroughly that he snatched it away and showed me how to do it.

At a moment when America feels angry and betrayed, when our leaders have forfeited our trust and jeopardized our future, we lost an American icon who stood for traits that have been in short supply in the Bush administration: shrewdness, humility, decency, generosity, class.

When I asked W. in 1999 if he identified with any literary heroes, he said no, but he was drawn to Paul Newman’s defiance in “Cool Hand Luke.”

The Texan cast himself as an anti-hero and rebel. But as president, he knew how to strut only in photo-ops, not when actual calamities loomed or hit.

Newman was a rare liberal who loved the label; he made it onto Nixon’s enemies list for supporting Eugene McCarthy’s anti-Vietnam run. In 1997, I called him when he began writing a bit for The Nation (where he was an investor). He ranted about right-wingers “popping out of rat holes” but also faulted the Clintons.

“Everything is about what’s winnable, not about the morality of the issues,” he told me. In politics, as in racing cars, he said: “You can do anything if you are prepared to deal with the consequences.”

I was nervous the first time I met the star, because he’d been a teenage crush — along with William F. Buckley Jr. (I loved Buckley’s sesquipedalian dexterity — a lost art in the anti-intellectual conservative set of W. and Sarah Palin.)

We met at a restaurant on the Upper East Side, where he proceeded to interview me.

Newman: “What do you know about nuclear disarmament?”

Dowd: “Ummm.”

Newman: “How can you justify The Times’s editorial position on the moratorium?”

Dowd: “Ummm.”

He was deeply uncomfortable at getting adulation for playacting, acknowledging that “there’s something very corrupting about being an actor. It places a terrible premium on appearance.”

With a Butch Cassidy grin, he told me that he pictured his epitaph being: “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.”

He did not want to talk about his movies; he wanted to talk throw-weights. He liked Bach and Budweiser and playing goofy practical jokes. (Once, when we were driving, he began high-speed bumping the car in front of us, driven by his friend.) He was bored by fashion and embarrassed by women who brazenly flirted with him or asked him to take off his sunglasses to show his blue eyes.

Once, when he was handing out punch at a Westport charity event, a dowager asked him to stir her drink with his finger.

“I’d be glad to,” Newman replied, “but I just took it out of a cyanide bottle.”

He recalled how utterly flummoxed he was the time a stunning call girl approached him on Fifth Avenue and offered to dispense with her fee.

“You want to send her off with something classy and stylish, the way Cary Grant would, or Clint Eastwood,” he said. “You think, how would Hombre handle this? And when this woman came up to me — the guy who played Hud — what comes through? Laurel and Hardy. Both of them.”

He said he was not like his sultry, flamboyant characters: “You don’t always have Tennessee Williams around to write glorious lines for you.”

He and his wife were reputed to have one of the happiest marriages in Hollywood, but the outspoken Joanne Woodward admitted that it took a lot of therapy to cope with the fact that, even though she got an Oscar first, he was able to stay a leading man for four decades. She told a magazine that she was always “uncomfortable and even angry” that “Paul was so much bigger than I was ... Because he was living my fantasy” to be a star.

She would not talk to me for The Times’s profile that her husband did to promote “The Color of Money” — even just on the topic of his role as the director of five movies that she had starred in. She said she did interviews only solo or jointly with him — not about him. That byzantine deal reflected the rivalry that threaded through their romance.

He said that he appreciated her, as he looked around his elegant Fifth Avenue apartment, observing dryly: “If anyone had ever told me 20 years ago I’d be sitting in a room with peach walls, I would have told them to take a nap in a urinal.”

[krisinluck]

Wonderful!

Thanks for that, toke. Nice way to start my day, and the best of the eulogies I've read for him.

[JavaNoire]

"Everything is about what’s winnable, not about the morality of the issues,”

This epitomizes much of what I adored about him!

I don't believe in heaven, hell, eternal life, or even 'God'...The reality of Paul Newman is some consolation.

[Hepburn]

bump since its commercial time