Paul Newman: 1925-2008

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Paul Newman

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Newman chose to let it all show. The weaknesses of the men he chose to play may be his most lasting legacy. His image, wrote the critic Stephen Farber, was that of ''a man chiseling detachment out of intense pain.'' No star who looked as heroic as Newman ever took on more losers, cads, bums, bastards, and beaten men, or played them with more understanding or less sentimentality. To watch Newman, from his 20s into his late 70s, is to see an actor wrestling with the definition of American manhood in the 20th century. What does it mean to be a good son, an honorable husband, a sensitive father, a caring lover, an honest man? How low do you have to sink before you can find redemption? And when is it too late? What Paul Newman leaves behind is not as simple as the twinkle in his eye and defiant charm he lent to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Sting; it's the slump in his shoulders and trembling terror of the worn-out drunk in The Verdict, the rageful, cut-off loneliness at the core of Hud, the prim emotional constriction of Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, the wry, half-defeated midlife madness of the hockey coach in Slap Shot. ''One of the things that I love about Paul's work was that he always had a sense of humor about what he was doing no matter how dark it was,'' says Ed Harris, who appeared with him in the 2005 HBO drama Empire Falls. ''His humanity always shone through.''

In his final big-screen appearance, in 2002's Road to Perdition, Newman took on one of the least sympathetic roles of his career, a quietly murderous Irish Mob boss, and created a small, perfect essay on emotional compartmentalization. Still as a frozen lake, irresistible and terrifying, he found, at 77, something new to explore. The performance was, if such a thing can be said, typical Paul Newman. He was every inch the movie star he had always been, and also the great actor that he never quite realized he had become.

Additional reporting by Vanessa Juarez and Adam Markovitz

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