The most embarrassing roles of Paul Newman’s career: “They have nothing to do with me”
Even though it’s not an untrue sentence, it was in everybody’s best interests not to call Paul Newman a movie star when he was towering over the industry as one of its most talented and bankable names.
He got into the business because he wanted to become a respected performer and master his craft to the highest possible level, and stardom was nothing more than a byproduct of his gifts. “Unfortunate” might not be the right word when it made him rich beyond his wildest dreams, but Newman was never thrilled with the fame he captured during his rise to the top.
Whenever celebrities are spotted out and about by their adoring public, they’re inevitably bombarded by autograph hunters. Newman knew that, but he didn’t care because he refused to sign them. He possessed a pair of cinema’s most enrapturing peepers, another thing he grew to detest when his dramatic prowess was constantly overshadowed by the fact he was a handsome lad with an iconic pair of blue eyes.
There’s definitely a difference between actors and movie stars, and while Newman would have preferred being the former over the latter, the inescapable fact was that he was both. A regular presence on Academy Award shortlists and at the top of the box office, really, it was his own fault for being so damned popular and talented that he was left to abhor the trappings of his status.
To illustrate his disdain for the fame game, Newman felt nothing but embarrassment at the plaudits being showered on him. From his point of view, he was merely an actor for hire who turned up, played the character as written on the page to the best of his ability, and then went home.
However, three pictures released within four years of each other that all had one-word titles beginning with the same letter were singled out for particular scorn, which perhaps explains why he never made a fourth monosyllabic movie that started with an ‘H’.
“I’m not bored by it. You can’t be bored by it,” he told Rolling Stone of his feelings on his career. “You can be plenty embarrassed by it, though, because what they’re applauding has nothing to do with me. They’re applauding Harper, Hombre, Hud, all those celluloid manifestations of what I’m supposed to be like. But those characters were created by writers.”
Still, any character is only as good as the actor who plays it, although Newman would disagree. “They were interpreted by me as an actor, but they were created by the writers, and they have nothing to do with me,” he explained. “That’s why it’s embarrassing; because people don’t seem to be willing to separate the allure of the character and the actor who plays him.”
All he wanted was for people to see and grasp the distinction between Paul Newman the actor and the roles he played on the silver screen, and when those lines became too blurred for his liking, the legend felt nothing but red-faced embarrassment.
