“It’s a fact”: the only person in Hollywood who said Paul Newman “was not a great actor”
Paul Newman is one of the coolest, suavest, most handsome men to ever grace a big screen, with a legacy of incredible movies that is utterly untouchable, aside from being a real-life daredevil, known for his love of motor racing.
He also founded Newman’s Own, a food brand that donates 100% of its post-tax profits to charity, and the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, a summer camp for seriously ill children; so, basically, he was one hell of a guy, which makes it incredibly shocking when anybody has a bad word to say about him, such as Frank Langella.
Langella is probably best known for playing the eponymous naughty president in Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon, but he got his start on the stage, which is where he first played Nixon, and won four Tony Awards for his efforts.
He never appeared in a movie with Newman, but he did feel like he knew him well enough to mention him in his memoir, Dropped Names: Famous Men & Women as I Knew Them, causing quite a stir when he described the iconic star as “a little dull”.
At the 2012 edition of the Nantucket Film Festival, Langella took the opportunity to defend himself, explaining, “It’s a fact, and I promised myself I would write an honest book. I read these sugar-coated biographies that drive me crazy. I said ‘dull’ not to insult him but to say that he was a victim of his beauty, a real victim of it as much as female beauties are.”
As much as he tried to explain himself, it still came off as Langella feeling negatively towards Newman, and extremely out of place. A number of his contemporaries and successors have heralded him as one of the all-time greats, and it’s only really Steve McQueen who didn’t get on with Newman, a feeling that was more than mutual. However, Langella went on to explain, his opinion is merely a matter of perspective.
“He had a tremendous desire to be a great actor, but he was not a great actor,” he continued, “Great actors are rare. He was a movie star, and that’s not an insult… Paul is a movie star, of which, there are hardly any more of really.”
Langella isn’t the only person to make this observation, for George Clooney, a Newman mega-fan, once described him and his Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid co-star Robert Redford as “the last real movie stars”. When Ethan Hawke made a documentary series about Newman and his long-term wife Joanna Woodward, he called it The Last Movie Stars.
The debate surrounding the difference between an ‘actor’ and a ‘movie star’ has been raging on for decades. While most performers would like to be recognised for their ability, not everyone is cut out to receive that kind of press. But the movie business as we know it today would not exist without the names and faces that get people through the door, so Langella actually wasn’t insulting Newman with his comments but merely saying that he fulfilled a different criterion for greatness.
