The docuseries ‘The last stars of Hollywood’ shows how fertile their relationship is on many levels, but also how she had to park part of her career to take care of the family
In the mid eighties, Paul Newman began to work side by side with the screenwriter Stewart Stern, in a memoir in which his collaborators and relatives would share memories and later he would give his version of the events. Something must have bothered Newman about the collected statements when, five years after starting the process, he decided to burn all the tapes. But the transcripts survived and have become the fodder for a book and documentary miniseries. The first, ‘The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man’, is an immersion in Newman’s inner life, which will hit our bookstores on November 23rd. Before it premieres ‘The Last Hollywood Stars’ (HBO Max, from Thursday, day 3), the story of a marriage told through its films.
Although sometimes we forget Joanne Woodward He was a star before Paul Newman. She won the Oscar for best leading actress the same year they were married, in 1958, for the tour de force of ‘The Three Faces of Eve’. At that time Newman was trying to emerge from the shadow of colleagues at the Actors Studio such as Marlon Brando or James Dean, whose death had allowed him to shine in ‘Marked by Hatred’. It was also in 1958 that ‘The Long Hot Summer’ was released, the first of the sixteen films that Paul and Joanne made together.
In the miniseries, Ethan Hawke, director of the project, traces this vital and artistic alliance through what he calls “a work with voices”. In the middle of quarantine, he brought together famous friends over Zoom to interpret transcripts later illustrated with photos and movie clips. among the guests, George Clooney like Newmann, laura linney like Woodward or Zoë Kazangranddaughter of Elia Kazan, in a complicated role: Newman’s first wife, Jackie Witte, who had abandoned her own acting dreams to raise their three children and suffered from her husband’s cuckolding for five years.
disgust at first sight
After serving in the Pacific during World War II, Newman studied at the Yale School of Drama for a year and then went to New York, where he went through the Actors Studio, just as Woodward ended up doing after studying drama in Louisiana. They did not see each other for the first time in that mythical actor’s workshop, but in the offices of his mutual representative, Maynard Morris. And Woodward didn’t like one bit that Newman seemed “like fresh out of a block of ice”. Sparks began to fly when they were both understudies (he won the character) in the Broadway play “Picnic” in 1953.
Nearly a decade later, ‘The hustler’as after ‘Hud, the wildest among a thousand’, took Newman out of his image as a Greek statue to reveal an actor whose savage charisma could be matched by his delicacy of nuance. A star was finally born, as well as a political activist who supported Martin Luther King Jr. during her 1963 departure. Meanwhile, Woodward was forced to put part of her career on hold to raise her three daughters and help raise Newman’s previous children. Something that she, as she confesses in the series, she would think twice if she went back in time: “I hope the children understand that even if each and every one of them was adored, if I had to do it all over again, maybe I wouldn’t be a mother”.
Out of love and good taste, Newman signed her for almost all his films as director, from ‘Rachel, Rachel’ to ‘The Glass Menagerie’, including the beautiful ‘The effect of gamma rays on daisies’. Woodward also shone in ‘Waiting for Mr. Bridge’, directed by James Ivory in 1990, her last joint work with her husband. They didn’t part with each other until Newman’s death from lung cancer in 2008, aged 83. She is still alive, but suffers from Alzheimer’s and has not directly participated in the docuseries.
Towards another way of interpreting
‘The last stars of Hollywood’ was going to be a feature film until, as Hawke has commented, the magnitude and breadth of the project became evident. This is not only the chronicle of a marriage, but also a history of the art of acting during the second half of the 20th century. When Newman and Woodward arrived in New York, professors like Stella Adler either Sanford Meisner they were taking the performance from theatricality to realism and betting on instinct rather than intellect.
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“His generation changed the American interpretation,” Hawke has said. in an interview with ‘Variety’. “What happened in the 1950s with the Actors Studio, with Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams, is a turning point in the history of acting. It radically changed the way we tell stories and we’re still reacting to it.”
With his role as a dilapidated abolitionist leader in the series ‘The Woodpecker’, Hawke began his career “of old” (it is description of you), a stage that Newman addressed in an inspiring way with his roles in films such as ‘Not a Silly Hair’, ‘At Sunset’ or ‘Road to Perdition’, which earned him his ninth Oscar nomination in 2003. He had obtained his only statuette (the honorable one apart) for ‘The color of money’ in 1987, almost three decades after Woodward got it.