The movie that almost ruined Paul Newman’s career: “I was lucky to survive”
History has shown that no matter how many good movies or impressive performances an actor notches across a number of years, sometimes it only takes one film to kill a career. That didn’t happen to Paul Newman, as his decades-long reign as one of Hollywood’s brightest shining stars can attest, but he was terrified it would happen at one point.
It seems odd to think that someone who won an Academy Award from eight nominations, claimed two honorary prizes, and was shortlisted at least once in five different decades from the 1950s to the 2000s would be looking over their shoulder waiting for their time in the spotlight to be brought to a forcible close, but Newman nonetheless carried that fear. For a spell, anyway.
He’d been a working actor for years before he even made his feature debut, gaining attention on Broadway, where he was quickly likened to Marlon Brando. They were of a similar age, studied under the same teachers, and brought something different and more natural to their craft, but as far as Newman was concerned, that was where the similarities ended.
When it finally came time to make the jump to cinema, Newman couldn’t have picked a worse project. It’s debatable if it deserves to be called the worst movie he ever appeared in, but if the man himself thought nothing ever scraped the bottom of the barrel quite like The Silver Chalice, then it’s hard to argue.
Newman hated Victor Saville’s 1954 historical epic so much that he shot himself in the foot when it premiered on television. He took out a full-page ad insisting that audiences avoid it like the plague when it was playing on the small screen, which drove viewing figures through the roof because everyone wanted to find out why one of the industry’s biggest names despised their own work.
He was only eight pictures into his movie career before Cat on a Hot Tin Roof got him on the Oscars shortlist for the first time, but Newman confessed to The Times in 2004 that if he had one overriding regret from a legendary career, it was that he should have said no a lot more often than he did.
“I only learnt five years ago that less is more,” he said. “I could have been more selective. I was lucky to survive my first film, The Silver Chalice. God, what a dog. The worst film of the ’50s.” He wasn’t out of the game for long, though, even if it’s telling that Newman took a yearlong leave of absence from celluloid following his unfortunate first outing.
Skipping 1955 entirely, he returned to play the boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me, having refocused his priorities on choosing the best parts, not just the ones that would guarantee his face would be projected on the biggest screen possible.
