R.I.P. Cool Hand

[Sir Ironhead]

One of the finest actors of any generation, Paul Newman passed away Friday due to cancer at age 83.

[Lady Nicolette]

Somehow I hadn't heard that yet.  What a great actor, one of the handsomest men ever and seemingly a good family man as well.  We sell a ton of Newman's Own products in my store, the family were early proponents of healthy organic foods.  Very sad to say goodbye.

[Welsh Wench]

Aside from the obvious movies like Butch Cassidy and The Sting, he starred in one of my favorite movies The Long, Hot Summer.
Southern decadence at its finest.

He will truly be missed.

Edit: Nickie, I didn't hear it except my mom called to tell me.

[theChuck]

yeah, it's not getting a lot of news coverage. but it did happen.

he ran his businesses well and was extremely generous. he will be sorely missed by many.

[Welsh Wench]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xvsauqv670c&feature=related

What a beautiful man.
Enjoy.

[Anna Iram]

My heart goes out to his wife and family. He seemed such a kind and spiritual man. Dedicated to his family, and to making our world better. He will be missed.

He was also on Nixon's "enemies" list. Makes him all the more special in my eyes.

[Taffy Saltwater]

He shall be missed.  Blessed be.

[Demetrius]

Sad news indeed- not only a fine actor but a tremendous humanitarian as well. We sure could use a lot more people like Paul.

[Ferret]

What terrible news to start my day with.

I saw him on a talk show years ago, the subject of many of the Hollywood affairs came up. Paul remarked why go out for burger when you have steak at home. It sounded like he really loved his wife and family.

I will miss him as an actor, his charities a lot of his products supported, and as a great man who loved his family.
Ferret

[Anna Iram]

I have to gush now....

I was introduced to him some years back when I lived in NYC. Just a brief hi nice to meet you kind of thing, but oh my gosh!  Such a charismatic man.


...okay, I'm done boasting now of my brush with Paul Newman. 

[Lady Amy of York]

Oh my gosh! I had not heard this !  What a loss. He was a great actor, and  a great person, who did a lot  for  different charities. He was an actor  who you could  respect  !   He was a gentleman.   
      Here is a news article they had on MSN  :

     Paul Newman, honored star of stage and screen for half a century who won audiences' affection and esteem in equal measure, died Friday after a long battle with lung cancer. He was 83.

From early on, he was recognized as both an unimpeachably serious actor and a matinee idol with angelic good looks and twinkling blue eyes. Both aspects would play their part in making him a bankable megastar just when the creative power in Hollywood was shifting from the studios to independent artists. Around that same time --1968, to be precise -- Newman developed a sideline as motion picture director, a role he took some half-dozen times over the next couple of decades. He also increasingly embraced the roles of exemplary citizen, philanthropist, political activist--and, as recently as 2006, championship race-car driver.

Newman gave strong performances and appeared in important movies in each of the decades he worked. Still, it's the two indelible title roles from the early 1960s -- paradigms of what came to be called "antiheroes" -- that throw the longest shadows. In "The Hustler" he played "Fast Eddie" Felson, a cocksure pool player come from the West Coast to New York City to challenge the legendary Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason). Eddie has talent to burn but not yet the "character" to avoid snatching defeat from victory. The drama -- which takes on Faustian overtones via an enigmatic gambler (George C. Scott) who diagnoses Eddie as a "born loser"-- ends on a note of bleak triumph, but only after exacting a terrible cost from Eddie and those who loved him.

No matter how brash, rash, or sulky Eddie Felson became, he still compelled sympathy. "Hud" is a portrait of "an unprincipled man," a "cold-blooded bastard" who "doesn't give a damn" about anybody or anything. Up to a point, this was not an unheard-of challenge for an avowedly serious actor, especially one with cred from Yale School of Drama, the Actors Studio, and performing in original Broadway productions of plays by Tennessee Williams and William Inge. But "Hud," and Hud, went beyond. Surely there'd be a turning, some piercing blow or epiphany to show Homer Bannon's unloved second son the way to "character"? No. Nothing reformed Hud. His character was what it was. And he remained true to it even as he casually slammed the ranchhouse door in our collective face. The End.

So Hud compelled scant sympathy. But he could charm the dew off the grass, and certainly the audience. And despite the film's firm denunciations of Hud and his heartlessness and materialism, that was at bottom OK. Because as the tagline on billboards assured us: "Paul Newman IS Hud."

Newman received his second and third best-actor Oscar nominations for those performances (he'd had his first in 1958 for playing Brick in the tortuously euphemized film of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"). He'd collect a fourth for 1967's "Cool Hand Luke," whose title character is sentenced to a chain gang for the sublimely useless anarchist gesture of cutting the heads off a streetful of parking meters, then evolves from jackoff-without-a-cause to Christ-like martyr.

Two years later, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969) brought Newman his greatest popularity. Paired in raffish outlawry with rising star Robert Redford, he displayed a comic touch that mostly deserted him in his officially labeled attempts to do comedy ("Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!," "A New Kind of Love," "The Secret War of Harry Frigg"). So refreshing was his and Redford's rapport, personally and professionally, that filmgoers couldn't help wanting to share their company (even if the movie is flagrantly false, a "hip" artifact that affects to demystify the classic heroic Western while concocting its own brand of soft-focus sentimentality). The actors would re-team as 1930s con artists in "The Sting" (1973). Both their movies became runaway hits and attracted a slew of Oscar nominations ("The Sting" going on to win best picture).

The Newman-Redford pictures were directed by George Roy Hill, which brings us to a curious fact: Newman rarely worked with first-rate directors, and when he did, the results were mostly disappointing. Newman the "Method" actor didn't jibe with Otto Preminger's objective approach in "Exodus" (1960) or Alfred Hitchcock's chilly classicism in "Torn Curtain." John Huston was equally chilly, in his own way, with the absurdist spy caper "The Mackintosh Man" (1973), to the extent that Newman seemed left out of the loop; and for all its charms, the frontier jape "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" (1972) displays director and star's mutual weakness for overextending the joke. Lacking even those charms was Robert Altman's "Buffalo Bill and the Indians" (1976), too locked into complacent historical revisionism to let Newman really tap the shame of being a two-shows-a-day charlatan, and "Quintet" (1979) was impenetrable. (Still, Newman gave those last two directors the benefit of his considerable savvy. When Huston suggested that Newman costar in his long-dreamt-of film of "The Man Who Would Be King," the actor pointed out that by the 1970s audiences would no longer accept a familiar American actor dressing up, faking a cockney accent, and trying to pass as a 19th-century Englishman: "Get Connery and Caine," he advised -- which Huston did, with magnificent results. As for Altman, that director delightedly approved of his friend's read of "The Player": "I know what this picture's about," Newman said. "It's about getting to see the tits of the girl whose tits you don't care about seeing, and not getting to see the tits of the girl whose tits you want to see." He wasn't kidding, and he was piercingly right.)

We've been speaking of a prolific career but neglecting a rich and enviable life, for the last fifty years of which Paul Newman was married to actress Joanne Woodward. (Previously, Newman had been wed for ten years to Jackie Witte, with whom he had three children.) He and Woodward met during his first Broadway run (Inge's "Picnic" in 1953), married in January 1958, and acted together onscreen that year in "The Long, Hot Summer" and "Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!" They went on to co-star in "From the Terrace" (1960), "Paris Blues" (1961), "A New Kind of Love" (1963), "Winning" (1969), "WUSA" (1970), and "The Drowning Pool" (1975). The Newmans chose to make their home far from Hollywood, in Westport, Conn. (where they raised three children of their own). In later years they co-starred as "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge" for Merchant-Ivory (1990), then had featured roles in the TV miniseries "Empire Falls" (2005, Newman's final work onscreen), though they shared no scenes.

Meanwhile, Newman had made his 1968 directorial debut to shepherd Woodward to glory in "Rachel, Rachel," a moving character study of a small-town schoolteacher tentatively deflected from the role of old maid. Adapted by longtime friend Stewart Stern from Margaret Laurence's novel "The Jest of God," and shot within hailing distance of the Newmans' own Connecticut home, this labor of love won Newman the New York Film Critics Circle Award as best director of 1968. Four Academy Award nominations followed, including best picture -- though not best director, which irked his wife and best-actress nominee no end. Newman would direct Woodward again in "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds" (1972 -- costarring their daughter Nell Potts), "The Shadow Box" (a TV-movie, 1980), and "The Glass Menagerie" (a Cannes Film Festival selection in 1987). Newman himself acted in none of these, but starred in as well as directed "Sometimes a Great Notion" (1971) and "Harry & Son" (1984).

Was he a reluctant star? He sometimes seemed stricken with a less virulent strain of what we might call Marlon Brando Disease -- a sense that he should apologize for having blue eyes, a weekend athlete's easy grace, and a likability that communicated itself to millions. There are movies in which a kind of self-immolation occurs, when Newman seems to be doing all he can to make himself unsympathetic--and in the process, to produce something as dour and unwatchable as "Winning" or "WUSA." For a manifestly witty man with no small gift for the well-turned phrase, he appeared to relish playing dumb, or at least not very bright, guys; the phenomenon set in with boxer Rocky Graziano in "Somebody Up There Likes Me" (1956, a role he inherited from the late James Dean) and reached its nadir with "Pocket Money" (1972 ). But "Slap Shot" (1977), about a bottom-of-the-barrel hockey team in a Pennsylvania rust-belt town, is a profane joy, beautifully anchored by a hilarious -- and surprisingly moving -- Newman as the larcenous team captain.

He had two more best-actor nominations in 1981-82 for "Absence of Malice" and "The Verdict" (excellent as an alcoholic Boston lawyer seizing a last chance to save his soul). The seventh time proved the charm: he finally won his Oscar for reprising Eddie Felson twenty-five years later in Martin Scorsese's "The Color of Money" (1986). But the best was yet to come: his warm, funny, beleaguered Sully in "Nobody's Fool" (1994), Robert Benton's lovingly wrought celebration of community and the emotional geography of a small town. Clear as a winter bell, might it be the finest performance of the '90s? An eighth Academy nomination followed, as well as the best-actor awards of the New York Film Critics and the National Society of Film Critics. (At the former group's awards dinner, Newman and Robert Redford were to present each other's prizes -- the former Sundance Kid having directed the critics' best-picture choice, "Quiz Show." Despite eleven years' age advantage, the formally attired Redford looked tired and worn opposite the 70-year-old Newman, sauntering to the dais in what may have been a casual jacket donned for an afternoon working in the yard.)

We haven't even begun to pay tribute to his philanthropies -- especially the Newman's Own line of salad dressings, pasta sauces, et al., founded with writer A.E. Hotchner in 1982, administered by Newman's daughter Susan, and funneling all profits to charity ($220 million by early 2008). His commitment to support liberal political causes dates back at least to Gene McCarthy's 1968 run for the presidency and included helping bankroll The Nation political magazine. And still with the awards: a ninth Oscar nomination, this time in the supporting-actor category, for his gangland paterfamilias in 2002's "Road to Perdition."

[Noble Dreg]

Honestly few people are truly thankful for the gifts they have, myself included.  Hollywood types are worse than most.  Normally I do not "morn" the passing of a "star" but this one's a bit different.  This one cared.  This one will be missed.

A fine soul indeed.

[Joyce "Delfinia DuSwallow" Howard]

So SAD.

[Synnovea]

 

[Lady Amy of York]

Here is a very touching article i found this morning on the computer about Paul Newman. It discusses his humanitarian  side.   I wish there were more people with his kind of money and  fame , who were as  caring and generous  as him. The world loss a great man ! May his charities  continue  to do well ! Thankyou Mr. Newman for all the good  you   did !  R.I.P  dear sir .
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Paul Newman
He used his fame to give away his fortune.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Saturday, Sept. 27, 2008, at 10:20 AM ET
The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp opened in Connecticut in 1988 to provide a summer camping experience—fishing, tie-dye, ghost stories, s'mores—for seriously ill children. By 1989, when I started working there as a counselor, virtually everyone on staff would tell some version of the same story: Paul Newman, who had founded the camp when it became clear his little salad-dressing lark was accidentally going to earn him millions, stops by for one of his not-infrequent visits. He plops down at a table in the dining hall next to some kid with leukemia, or HIV, or sickle cell anemia, and starts to eat lunch. One version of the story has the kid look from the picture of Newman on the Newman's Own lemonade carton to Newman himself, then back to the carton and back to Newman again before asking, "Are you lost?" Another version: The kid looks steadily at him and demands, "Are you really Paul Human?"

Newman loved those stories. He loved to talk about the little kids who had no clue who he was, this friendly old guy who kept showing up at camp to take them fishing. While their counselors stammered, star-struck, the campers indulged Newman the way they'd have indulged a particularly friendly hospital blood technician. It took me years to understand why Newman loved being at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. It was for precisely the same reason these kids did. When the campers showed up, they became regular kids, despite the catheters and wheelchairs and prosthetic legs. And when Newman showed up, he was a regular guy with blue eyes, despite the Oscar and the racecars and the burgeoning marinara empire. The most striking thing about Paul Newman was that a man who could have blasted through his life demanding "Have you any idea who I am?" invariably wanted to hang out with folks—often little ones—who neither knew nor cared.

For his part, Newman put it all down to luck. In his 1992 introduction to our book about the camp, he tried to explain what impelled him to create the Hole in the Wall: "I wanted, I think, to acknowledge Luck: the chance of it, the benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others; made especially savage for children because they may not be allowed the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it." Married to Joanne Woodward, his second wife, for 50 years this winter, Newman always looked at her like something he'd pulled out of a Christmas stocking. He looked at his daughters that way, too. It was like, all these years later, he couldn't quite believe he got to keep them.


Of course, it wasn't all luck. He lost his son, Scott, to a drug overdose in 1978, so in 1980, he founded the Scott Newman Center, which works to prevent substance abuse. When he first began to donate 100 percent of the proceeds from his food company, Newman's Own, to charity, critics accused him of grandiosity. Grandiose? Tell that to the recipients of the quarter-billion dollars he's given away since the company's creation in 1982. First Paul Newman made fresh, healthy food cool, then he and his daughter Nell made organic food cool. Then he went and made corporate giving cool by establishing the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy. And all this was back in the '90s, before Lance Armstrong bracelets and organic juice boxes.

But Newman never stopped believing he was a regular guy who'd simply been blessed, and well beyond what was fair. So he just kept on paying it forward. He appreciated great ideas for doing good in the world—he collected them the way other people collect their own press clippings—and he didn't care where they came from. Whether you were a college kid, a pediatric oncologist, or a Hollywood tycoon, if you had a nutty plan to make life better for someone, he'd write the check himself or hook you up with somebody who would.

Today there are 11 camps modeled on the Hole in the Wall all around the world, and seven more in the works, including a camp in Hungary and one opening next year in the Middle East. Each summer of the four I spent at Newman's flagship Connecticut camp was a living lesson in how one man can change everything. Terrified parents would deliver their wan, weary kid at the start of the session with warnings and cautions and lists of things not to be attempted. They'd return 10 days later to find the same kid, tanned and bruisey, halfway up a tree or canon-balling into the deep end of the pool. Their wigs or prosthetic arms—props of years spent trying to fit in—were forgotten in the duffel under the bed. Shame, stigma, fear, worry, all vaporized by a few days of being ordinary. In an era in which nearly everyone feels entitled to celebrity and fortune, Newman was always suspicious of both. He used his fame to give away his fortune, and he did that from some unspoken Zen-like conviction that neither had ever really belonged to him in the first place.

Hollywood legend holds that Paul Newman is and will always be larger-than-life, and it's true. Nominated for 10 Oscars, he won one. He was Fast Eddie, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy. And then there were Those Eyes. But anyone who ever met Paul Newman will probably tell you that he was, in life, a pretty regular-sized guy: A guy with five beautiful daughters and a wonder of a wife, and a rambling country house in Connecticut where he screened movies out in the barn. He was a guy who went out of his way to ensure that everyone else—the thousands of campers, counselors, and volunteers at his camps, the friends he involved in his charities, and the millions of Americans who bought his popcorn—could feel like they were the real star.