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Newman Known For Irresistible Characters

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Los Angeles Times

Published: September 28, 2008

HOLLYWOOD - Paul Newman, that pure and concentrated essence of classic movie stardom, reinvented himself a couple of times in the span of his long career, until he ended up playing the kind of guy he might have become had he never left his native Shaker Heights, Ohio: an ultra-conservative cold-fish Midwestern lawyer, married for decades to the same woman (see his performance in "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge," from 1990).

But he will be remembered best for playing the polar opposite, a recurring persona he took up and reprised from 1958 through 1969, the nonconformist ne'er-do-well, idolized by criminals and women who knew better, reviled by authority and tradition.

A quick survey of the characters Newman inhabited during that time reveals several recurring characteristics.

There's the matter of his alarming beauty, which was almost always treated as a complicating factor in his characters' lives. But he had a fondness for playing rough-and-tumble losers, drunks, failures and outcasts. His rebel nonconformists were often nonconformist in pointless, self-serving, usually self-destructive ways.

Remarkably, he was almost never paired with the great beauties of his time, appearing instead opposite actresses of lesser looks than his. Piper Laurie, Patricia Neal and Joanne Woodward - whom he eventually would marry and remain with for life - played characters in thrall to his charm and charisma, usually to their detriment.

The most beautiful actress he was ever cast opposite also played the character he rebuffed most cruelly - Elizabeth Taylor's Maggie, who longed hopelessly for his closeted homosexual Brick in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

It's not the sort of thing you see much at the movies anymore - the examination of the male bombshell, a character as irresistible as he is casually destructive to himself and others.

Even when Newman's characters liked women, he wasn't very good to them. In "The Hustler," he took up with a disabled alcoholic who, for a while, supported him. In "Cool Hand Luke," where the only woman in sight was his mother, he broke her heart.

Yet the Paul Newman anti-hero, a rake if ever there was one, was irresistible to men and women alike.

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