The 1956 award that nobody in the history of cinema won except Paul Newman
Having become one of the most famous bridesmaids in Academy Awards history, you can understand why Paul Newman became increasingly convinced that he’d never win a competitive Oscar.
After six unsuccessful ‘Best Actor’ nominations, plus a ‘Best Picture’ nod for Rachel, Rachel, which he produced and directed, the Hollywood icon had grown accustomed to getting shut out, and in most cases, receiving a lifetime achievement equivalent is a sign that he’d end his career empty-handed.
Of course, you couldn’t make it up that 12 months after Newman was gifted an honorary Oscar for his contributions to the industry, he took to the stage to claim the one that always looked like it was going to get away: his ‘Best Actor’ prize for reprising the role of ‘Fast’ Eddie Felson in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money.
28 years after his first nomination for 1958’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he’d finally reached the mountaintop. If he hadn’t, he may well have gone down in history as the greatest actor never to win an Oscar, but before he’d even been shortlisted for the first time, Newman had been the recipient of a gong that nobody else has ever won.
Why? Either to make fun of him, or to make him feel better. It had to be one of the two, since there aren’t many other obvious reasons that come to mind as to why director Robert Wise and producer Charles Schnee would go out of their way to create the ‘Noscar’, in recognition of Newman not being nominated for the real thing.
Newman gave the first great performance of his career in Wise’s 1956 biopic of boxer Rocky Graziano, but he didn’t make the cut in a stacked ‘Best Actor’ field, with The King and I‘s Yul Brynner beating out Giant‘s James Dean and Rock Hudson, Lust for Life‘s Kirk Douglas, and Richard III‘s Laurence Olivier.
Instead, he got a bespoke trophy, bearing the inscription, “The Scnee-Wise Noscar Award to Paul Newman for portraying a terrible no-good, for turning him into a charming and lovable sprite, and for thereby doing what Lincoln said should never be done, fooling all of the people all of the time.”
He took it in good stride, which is just as well, because his home life poured more salt into the wound. In September 1957, 14 months after Somebody Up There Likes Me was released, Nunnally Johnson’s The Three Faces of Eve arrived in cinemas. Starring Newman’s soon-to-be wife, Joanne Woodward, who he married in January 1958, she’d go on to win an Oscar for ‘Best Actress’ as the title character.
Ever the good sport, Newman and Woodward even posed with their trophies later on in the year, and as much as he played it up for the cameras, it goes without saying that he’d have much rather had an Oscar than a ‘Noscar’.
