The “dumb” decision Paul Newman always regretted and the classic role he gave away
Paul Newman would have been 100 years old this year, and it’s not even a question that if he were still here, he would be the coolest centaurian on the planet. He was cool when he was a young actor, and a middle-aged one, and, actually, as an older one too. He absolutely epitomised it. He was even in Cool Hand Luke, and let’s talk about that for a moment.
It’s hard to sum up how good a movie the 1967 prison drama Cool Hand Luke is, but let me try for a moment. It is so good that it should be taught in all schools as part of the curriculum, alongside Maths and Physics. It is such a good film that it should be introduced into all marriage ceremonies: “I promise to love, honour and sit down and watch Cool Hand Luke with you on several occasions.” It is so good, that if all other movies suddenly stopped existing and for some reason the only one left was Cool Hand Luke, nobody would ever complain or get bored of it.
Actually thinking about it, Back to the Future would have to stay along with it, because that’s a perfect film. Anyway, back to Paul Newman, who wasn’t just in Cool Hand Luke, but had he been, he’d still be one of the best actors in history.
As it turned out, he was in many, many other superb films too. You can take your pick from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Elizabeth Taylor, pool room classic The Hustler, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Verdict – the list goes on and on. Newman won Oscars, Golden Globes and Critics Choice awards by the bucket load in his storied career and when he wasn’t busy conquering Hollywood he found time to be a racing driver and maker of pasta sauces too.
Like all actors with that kind of longevity though there were occasional roles that he missed out on or passed up on though, with one memorably being the Bob Fosse musical from 1979 All That Jazz. The lead role eventually went to Roy Scheider of Jaws fame and the movie about an obsessive stage director was much acclaimed; even Stanley Kubrick of all people said it was, “The best film I have ever seen.”
Newman was offered the role that Schieider played so memorably and to such devastating effect, and saw it as one of the major missed opportunities of his highly successful career. Asked by one reporter how he felt once he’d seen the finished movie, he said: “It was just dumb of me. I was just so stupid, I didn’t take into consideration what the contribution of the director was going to be. That was a terrible oversight.”
Fosse, who directed the film, was a former dancer and choreographer who based the film on his experience on his time in showbiz that lasted more than thirty years. He picked up an Academy Award, several Emmys and Tonys, only missing out on a full set by not having a Golden Globe. Newman’s underestimating him as a director was perhaps a surprise as Fosse had already been Oscar-nominated for helming the comedy biopic Lenny starring Dustin Hoffman some five years previously.
Undeterred, Newman switched his attention to directing a TV series the following year, and then in 1982, he was astonishing in The Verdict, the powerful courtroom drama from Sidney Lumet that saw him again land an Academy Award nomination. He repeated the trick four years later, but finally won when Martin Scorsese directed him in The Color of Money, a sequel to The Hustler. He continued to bag awards all the way into his final years, with nominations and wins for Road to Perdition, Nobody’s Fool and HBO’s Empire Falls.
