The co-star who hated every second of working with Paul Newman: “I can’t stand that man”
Actors who take themselves and their craft very seriously, some might say too seriously, are often labelled as difficult to work with. Paul Newman may have fallen firmly into the former camp, but was rarely tarred with the latter brush during a legendary five-decade career.
He was familiar with the method but didn’t embrace it to the same extent as peers like Marlon Brando and James Dean. Newman immersed himself in his performances and dedicated most of his preparation to finding a way into the character, but he shook it off the second the cameras stopped rolling.
Most of his mainstream career was spent straddling the delicate line between heavyweight thespian and A-list movie star, and Newman grew accustomed to the balancing act. He was a ferociously committed performer and one of his era’s very best, but he also knew that he was an incredibly handsome and telegenic guy who could put butts in seats based on his presence alone.
Being so famous for his piercing blue eyes weighed heavily on his shoulders, though, which is one of the main reasons why he alternated between crowd-pleasing genre films and serious dramas. Then again, even his more accessible fare like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, and The Towering Inferno found themselves competing for Academy Awards, so he showed he could have it all.
He was also fond of a prank or two, but he was never what anyone would call an outright dickhead. In an actorly sense, at least. Some stars are a nightmare to work with because they eat, sleep, live, and breathe the role and find their tempers fraying as a result, whereas Newman was more mischievous.
Still, despite being a generally popular figure among his contemporaries, the Oscar winner wasn’t immune to pissing people off. John Huston’s solid-if-unspectacular semi-biographical comedy The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean cast Newman in the title role alongside a veritable bounty of big names like Roddy McDowall, Anthony Perkins, and Ned Beatty.
Way down the cast list was ‘Golden Age’ stalwart Ava Gardner, playing the real-life figure Lillie Langtry, who had a saloon named after her in Texas by Bean. Her career had tapered off, and her star was fading by the early 1970s. Still, she didn’t give an explanation for why the Mogambo headliner decided to tell her biographer that she loathed every second in Newman’s company.
“I can’t stand that man,” she said. “He’s one of my unfavourite actors. He’s an egomaniac and so false. He’s ‘on’ all the time.” As the ninth-billed name in the cast, Gardner’s presence in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean wasn’t substantial, but her limited time on set was enough to make her hate Newman with a burning passion.
Reports emerged from the set that Gardner’s struggles with alcohol made her fuse shorter than usual whenever she was required to perform her scenes, but whether that had anything to do with it or not, she didn’t have a kind word to say about Newman either way.
