Paul Newman's rise to fame was meteoric. Not long after his stint at the Actors Studio, he landed a leading role in the 1953 production of the hit play Picnic. He was immediately tapped for the movies. Because of his looks and his Actors Studio training, Paul Newman found himself in constant competition with JAMES DEAN, another actor who seemed cut from the same cloth. Hoping to make his film debut as the misunderstood son yearning for love in Elia Kazan's East of Eden (1955), Paul Newman saw the role given to Dean. In fact, Paul Newman was able to make his movie debut in The Silver Chalice (1955) only when Dean declined the offer. (Dean, it should be said, made the wiser choice - the biblical epic was panned by the critics.) The two actors' careers continued to be linked; the role of Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) had been slated for Dean until he died in a car accident. Paul Newman took over the part, and it became his first hit film.
It was the first of many. During the next 15 years Paul Newman was the hottest actor in Hollywood. He peaked at the end of the 1960s, had a rather poor decade in the 1970s, but reemerged in the 1980s with some of the best performances of his career. In fact, his Oscar nominations tend to uphold that assessment. He was nominated for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Absence of Malice (1981), The Verdict (1982), and finally took home the honor for a reprise of his Fast Eddie role from The Hustler in The Color of Money (1986).
As one of the original cofounders of First Artists, along with BARBRA STREISAND, SIDNEY POITIER, and STEVE MCQUEEN, Paul Newman was in a position to control more of his work, and he did so during the 1970s, producing and directing a number of films. He began to direct in the late 1960s, making Rachel, Rachel (1968), a film starring his wife, JOANNE WOODWARD, that was well received, if not a major box-office success. He went on to produce and direct several other films, including the highly underrated Sometimes a Great Notion (1971), in which he also starred, and three other vehicles for his wife, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the- Moon Marigolds (1972), The Shadow Box (1980), and The Glass Menagerie (1988).
He recouped smartly in the 1980s, becoming once again the powerful box-office force that he had been in his early years, and making much better movies in the bargain. Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981) was a controversial hit that put Paul Newman back in the spotlight. His troubles with the media during that film led him to make the intelligent and thoughtprovoking Absence of Malice (1981), a film that dealt with the power of the press to destroy innocent people. He continued making quality films throughout the 1980s, including his semiautobiographical Harry and Son (1984), which he wrote, produced, and directed. It was a film that touched on the difficult relationship between a man and his son, and it owed much to Paul Newman's experience with the death of his son by drug overdose in 1978. Outside of the film industry, Paul Newman has been politically active in liberal causes and has become well-known for his various food products, the profits of which he donates to charity. He is also a highly visible racecar driver who became especially interested in the sport during the making of Winning (1969).
In 1985, Paul Newman was given a special Oscar in honor of his fine work. In his acceptance speech, he told the academy not to write him off, that he wasn't through yet. The following year he won the Best Actor Award for The Color of Money. Paul Newman and Woodward appeared together in Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), a critically acclaimed film in which he perhaps had his best performance, but the Oscar nomination went to his wife. After appearing in the Coen brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy (1993), his acting talent was recognized for his role as Donald "Sully" Sullivan, a 60ish guy attempting to mend relationships in Nobody's Fool; he received Best Actor awards from the Berlin Film Festival, the New York Film Critics, and the National Board of Review, and also received Best Actor nominations for a Golden Globe and an Oscar. In 1998 he played an ex-cop, ex-private detective in Twilight and Kevin Costner's father in Message in a Bottle, a film in which he overshadowed Costner. Paul Newman also starred as an aging mob boss in Road to Perdition (2002), again being nominated for an Oscar.
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1. Robert Aldrich produced many social and political movies
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