Paul Newman: one of the best actors of all time

For Empire’s February 2023 issue, we asked readers to vote for the best actors of all time – the silver-screen stars that always deliver, that have changed the game, and whose distinctive talents cannot be replicated. And the winners, in no particular order, are…

Marilyn Monroe

Notable roles: Rose Loomis (Niagara), Lorelei Lee (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), Pola Debevoise (How to Marry a Millionaire), The Girl (The Seven Year Itch), Sugar "Kane" Kowalczyk (Some Like It Hot), Roslyn Tabor (The Misfits)

Oscars won: 0

Iconic line: "I wanna be loved by you, alone… Boop-boop-a-doop!" (Some Like It Hot)

A true movie star, in every sense, Marilyn Monroe's earth-shattering fame sometimes threatened to overshadow everything else – but beneath the ‘blonde bombshell’ sex symbol was the heart of a true artist, who was comfortable with her sexuality and femininity and used it to brilliant ends, in comedies and dramas.

Bette Davis

Notable roles: Margo Channing (All About Eve), Julie Marsden (Jezebel), Leslie Crosby (The Letter), Charlotte Vale (Now, Voyager), Baby Jane Hudson (What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?), Mildred Rogers (Of Human Bondage)

Oscars won: 2 (Jezebel, Dangerous)

Iconic line: “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” (All About Eve)

Seldom has an actor emanated so much force on-screen: Bette Davis was a cinematic cyclone, sweeping through scenes, leaving co-stars dazed and debris in her wake. She took on one complex role after another, not caring if the characters were unlikeable, and aced them all. Her work still bites today.

Humphrey Bogart

Notable roles: Rick Blaine (Casablanca), Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep), Frank McCloud (Key Largo), Charlie Allnutt (The African Queen), Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Duke Mantee (The Petrified Forest), Harry Dawes (The Barefoot Contessa), Roy Earle (High Sierra), Harry 'Steve' Morgan (To Have And Have Not)

Oscars won: 1 (The African Queen)

Iconic line: “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid” (Casablanca)

The thing about Bogart is that his “iconic line” is basically every line he ever said. His laconic, tough-guy energy gave every line a spin of cool defiance that screenwriters rose to match. He wasn’t the tallest, strongest, or most handsome, and at times he barely seemed to move – but you could never take your eyes off him.

Marlon Brando

Notable roles: Stanley Kowalski (A Streetcar Named Desire), Terry Malloy (On The Waterfront), Vito Corleone (The Godfather), Colonel Kurtz (Apocalypse Now), Jor-El (Superman: The Movie)

Oscars won: 2 (On The Waterfront, The Godfather)

Iconic line: “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” (The Godfather)

Among the most influential screen actors of all-time, Brando hit Hollywood like a hammer in the early 1950s – fundamentally changing the definition of “good” acting, despite Truman Capote calling him "dumb as hell." Brando’s deeply-felt naturalism was magnetic, and all his famous difficulty was worth it for his undeniable power. 

Paul Newman

Notable roles: “Fast” Eddie Felson (The Hustler, The Color Of Money), Reggie Dunlop (Slap Shot), Frank Galvin (The Verdict), Hud Bannon (Hud), Henry Gondorff (The Sting), Luke Jackson (Cool Hand Luke), Butch Cassidy (Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid), John Rooney (Road To Perdition)

Oscars won: 1 (The Color Of Money)

Iconic line: “You don’t know what winning is, Bert. You’re a loser. ‘Cause you’re dead inside! Too high, Bert - the price is too high.”  (The Hustler)

Cool, laconic, capable of eating way more hard-boiled eggs than you – he was a bona fide movie star, film director, race car driver, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. Oscar Levant wrote that Newman initially was hesitant to leave New York for Hollywood, and that Newman had said, "Too close to the cake. Also, no place to study." The Hustler was the portrait of a sad man who's afraid to be a winner, that type perhaps was a first in the cannons of American cinema. Source: www.empireonline.com

While Hud does not shoot Homer in the film Hud, Lonnie nonetheless assigns him responsibility for his granddad’s demise. Old Homer moans and dies while lying across Hud’s lap. Lon pulls his dead granddad’s head out of Hud’s lap into his, accusing Hud of “fixing it so that he didn’t want to live anymore.” James Wong Howe gives us a high angle of Hud standing and moving to his right toward the Cadillac’s headlamps.  We cut to an instant of blackness before Hud enters the frame screen right, camera looking up. Hud stops in the center of this extraordinary shot, starkly but flatteringly lit against black, looking down at Lon and us: “You don’t know the whole story.” And then adds: “I guess you could say I helped him about as much as he helped me.” By now Martin Ritt may have assumed the audience would feel that no backstory could excuse Hud. But we must draw a vital distinction between explanation and justification in order to consider more thoroughly why Ritt’s desired effect was “lost in translation” from novel to film. First, the Hollywood-conditioned audience was likely pulling for Hud to be a misunderstood hero who will be redeemed by a good woman. Except for the attempted rape scene, for example, Newman is always photographed in classic three-point lighting, which enhances the star’s attractiveness. 

After the rape attempt, Hud spots Alma waiting at the bus station; “I’m sorry,” he says, cocking his hat. She reasserts her own libido and female power by stating an irony: she might have seduced him eventually “without the roughhouse.” Her silent stare at Hud when he responds, “Why didn’t you speak up sooner?,” fairly clenches Patricia Neal’s Academy Award for Best Actress. “I’ll remember you, Honey,” he says as she boards the bus, camera looking down on him from within. “You’re the one that got away.” Hud, the outsider, drifts to screen right and out of frame as bus and camera take Alma mercifully away from this “cold-blooded bastard.” But the original audience might still have wondered whether some part of Hud, a remorseful, tragic hero, really means, “You’re the one I could have loved had I not injured you so”? 

In any case, the film turns the novel’s antagonist into an ironic protagonist. This strongly suggests that Hud’s having accidentally killed his older brother Norman (Lon’s father) in a drunken car crash at age seventeen accounts for his need to protect himself from the guilt and loss. Homer “took that hard,” but reviled Hud long before the accident, we are surprised to learn. There are several instances of Hud’s aberrant behavior that might, with a different mode of narration, elicit compassion: Homer raised him harshly, kept him “driving that feedwagon” instead of letting him go to college (Horseman). In the novel Homer had sent him to the Pacific in World War II where he was left traumatized. Paul Newman’s biographer Daniel O’Brien writes, the actor “felt the audience had only seen the ‘cool’ superficial Hud Bannon, failing to pick up on the dark, amoral character underneath.” Newman said in 1967: "I got a lot of letters after that picture from kids saying Hud was right. The old man’s a jerk and the kid’s a schmuck. That son of a bitch that I hated they loved. So the audience makes a film their own – it depends what’s going on at the time in the country." 

Ritt, Ravetch, Frank Jr., and Newman transformed Hud somewhat out of the novel’s sociopath into what I call a wounded narcissist with antisocial traits, a role that proved the perfect vehicle for Paul Newman’s “sensitive rebel” persona, even if here Ritt thought to cast Newman against type as a raw villain. For in their urgency to portray Hud as no mere two-dimensional reprobate like his prototype in the novel, the filmmakers re-created the novel’s antagonist into the movie’s protagonist, yet evidently expecting the audience to condemn him nonetheless. As we know, in rebellious youth culture, the meaning of “cool” is that temporary ironic reversal of the very virtues and values the elders are trying to imprint onto the next generation, as if to question why the better part of wisdom is about never getting to have any fun. By the early 1960s, to be “cool,” perhaps, seemed integral to that separation and individuation process. It is important to understand that Hud’s original audience, did not need to endorse all of these behaviors in any literal sense in order for Hud’s acts to symbolize, even self-caricature, its own rebellious impulses. 

What was dominant in the post-World War II West was that version of capitalism known as Keynesianism, a holdover from the New Deal. It was based on economist John Maynard Keynes’s notion that capitalism, while the best of all possible economies, nevertheless needed government intervention, progressive taxation, and regulation to balance private profit with public well-being: that is, to minimize negative and optimize positive externalities. “An external cost occurs,” writes economist Steven L. Slavin, “when the production or consumption of some good or service inflicts costs on a third party without compensation. An external benefit occurs when some of the benefits derived from the production of some good or service are enjoyed by a third party”. As Granddad Homer tells Lon early in the film, “I expect you’ll get your share of what’s good,” implying the capitalist ideal of pursuing personal gain without costing others: 

“A boy like you deserves it.” Indeed, after a night of carousing with, and defending, Hud, Granddad tells Lon, “You’re going to have to make up your own mind someday what’s right and what’s wrong.” Homer in fact speaks for the filmmakers when he warns the teen, “Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire.” A large contingent of the New Left youth, likewise, would succumb to what Adam Curtis analyzes in the BBC documentary series The Century of the Self (2002). While some activists remained altruistically motivated, and counterculture hippies were communal, according to Curtis, many left-wing participants despaired of any outward revolution in favor of social change brought about through each individual’s inward liberation from outmoded social constraints. Technological advances in mass production allowed for a certain “customized” consumerism touting everyone’s unique individuality. Christopher Lasch likewise studied the mass psychology of the 1960s and 1970s as having grown dialectically out of older forms of neuroses like hysteria and obsessional neuroses, associated with older phases of capitalism, to the growing psychiatric concern with narcissism. 

In 2003, screenwriters Ravetch and Frank Jr. reflected back that something of this spirit was emerging during the making of Hud: “We felt the country was gradually moving into a kind of self-absorption, indulgence, and greed – which, of course, fully blossomed in the ’eighties and ’nineties’” (Baer 260). And narcissism itself indicates some psychological wounding at its heart contracted, as Marcuse argued in Eros and Civilization (1955), in a political economy experienced as “surplus repression.” The narcissist,” writes Christopher Lasch, “has no interest in the future because, in part, he has so little interest in the past”. It is as though the logical extension of Martin Ritt’s Old Left contempt for Haight-Ashbury was the Weather Underground, about which Lasch writes: “The atmosphere in which the weathermen lived – an atmosphere of violence, danger, drugs, sexual promiscuity, moral and psychic chaos – derived not so much from an older revolutionary tradition as from the turmoil and narcissistic anguish of contemporary America”.

As we have seen, Hud freely obeys his impulses, confident of simply improvising his way out of consequences. Homer argues not merely from neighborliness but from wider social responsibility: “And risk startin’ a’ epidemic in the entire country?”, which would be a severely negative economic externality. Hud argues from what he cynically regards as business norms: “Why, this whole country is run on epidemics, where you been?” In this sense, Hud, released on the eve of the JFK assassination, is not just a modern western but very much a film of the long 1950s at the “hard gate” of 1960s unrest, soon to be cynically embroiled in disappointed idealism-turned-mass-narcissistic indulgence. Interestingly, Larry McMurtry felt that sacrificing the herd, Homer’s life work, was the moral imperative. But though he admired the film, the author of Horseman assigned fault to the screenwriters for “following my novel too closely.” As Lasch maintains, “Many radicals still direct their indignation against the authoritarian family, repressive sexual morality, literary censorship, the work ethic, and other foundations of bourgeois order that have been weakened or destroyed by advanced capitalism itself” (xvi). Hud’s “rebellion” was therefore understandable in the abstract, even if such was the pseudo-rebellion of the new culture of narcissism across the political spectrum. —“You Don’t Know the Story”: Horseman, Pass By and the Misprision of Hud (2021) by Randall Spinks. Source: https://brightlightsfilm.com

Paul Newman: "In those days theatrical agents took the train up from Grand Central Station to New Haven to scout the new talent at the drama school. There was apparently at least one in attendance for one of Yale’s four performances of Beethoven, a fellow from the Liebling-Wood Agency, Jim Merrick. He came backstage afterwards, gave me his card, and suggested I come see him in Manhattan. The Liebling-Wood Agency was a powerhouse on Broadway. It represented many of the era’s leading playwrights—such as Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Yip Harburg—as well as some of the hottest stage talents, including Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. So I began making day trips to the city just to test the waters, on those days when I didn’t have classes. I read a theatrical trade paper called Actor’s Cues to find out about open casting calls, and went to many of them at CBS and NBC. They were airing a lot of live television dramas then being shot and broadcast from New York, but I never got any jobs from these open calls. Jim Merrick wanted to sign me to the Liebling-Wood Agency, but his bosses didn’t want to make a commitment to me. In the meantime, unbeknownst to Liebling-Wood, I’d also been seen by another talent agent, Maynard Morris, from the big MCA operation—but again with no commitment or obligation. One afternoon, Maynard sent me out to see a theater producer that the Liebling-Wood Agency had already had me visit. That’s when I decided to leave Liebling-Wood. That summer, I told Jackie I wanted to give New York a real try. For the time being, she would remain in New Haven with Scott, while I moved into a tiny apartment on the corner of Spring Street and Sixth Avenue, what’s now considered SoHo. It was incredibly tiny and I stayed there with two other people—a Yale young woman named Joan Szell and her boyfriend, who were summer housesitting for the actual tenants. Jackie had an aunt who lived on Staten Island and we moved there. Plus, someone we met suggested I might be able to get a job as a model. I was broke. I owned only one suit. And when I got offered a cover shoot for a detective magazine, I took it. I was posed with a cute girl in a brassiere, and I was supposed to be grabbing her arm. I was really embarrassed—but they paid me $150, which was quite a bit of money then. I walked out of that studio thinking, “Boy, I can go out now and buy me a new suit for $39.95!” 

"I became a member of the Actors Studio, the extraordinary acting study group headed by Lee Strasberg and famous for preaching the Method—the art of using your own memories and feelings to inhabit a role. How, I still wonder, did I ever pass that audition? They didn’t, and couldn’t, have responded to my acting. I’m sure the other actors there wondered, “How did this son of a bitch get in here?” But when I mixed my confidence and energy with my real emotions—terror and fright (which came out as rage)—something genuine was going on, even if just by accident. I felt the Actors Studio members were the real actors, the bohemians, and they saw this kid from Shaker Heights wearing his seersucker suit and, well, I was in their world but definitely I was not a part of it." —"Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of An Ordinary Man" (2022) by Paul Newman