Why Paul Newman fell out with two of Hollywood’s greatest directors
Most directors had only good things to say about Paul Newman. As a method actor who cared deeply about his craft, he occasionally put his collaborators through multiple takes as he tried to plumb the depths of his characters, but for the most part, he was a breeze to work with. In fact, he earned the respect of two of Hollywood’s toughest directors. John Huston adored him, which was a notoriously difficult thing to achieve, and Elia Kazan, the pioneering filmmaker who helped shape Marlon Brando, admired Newman as a director, saying that he might have been even more talented behind the camera than in front of it.
However, there were two legends of the silver screen with whom he did not get along. The first was Orson Welles. Yes, the man who brought us Citizen Kane and who is frequently cited as one of, if not the, greatest filmmakers to ever peer through a viewfinder made an enemy out of the young star. By all accounts, Welles only had himself to blame. He appeared with Newman in the 1958 melodrama The Long, Hot Summer, in which they played a wealthy landowner and a smouldering farmhand, respectively (it goes without saying). From the start, they did not get along.
As far as Newman was concerned, Welles was an absolute prima donna. “He was pretty standoffish, and he seemed to feel uneasy around Actors Studio people,” the younger actor wrote in his memoir, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, adding, “Orson couldn’t understand screen generosity, where one actor allows another player in his scene to deservedly get the best camera shots.” Instead, the great auteur would sabotage his fellow actors, elongating the vowels in his lines to hog more screen time. He was, it seemed, the consummate ham.
The other icon who got on Newman’s bad side was Alfred Hitchcock. In fairness to Newman, the ‘Master of Suspense’ prided himself on trivialising the contributions of actors. He had his favourite roster of stars—Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and Grace Kelly—but he didn’t take kindly to the ones who brought notions of craft to the table. He was the one who did the creating, as far as he was concerned, and the actors were just supposed to move where he told them and speak their lines when it was their turn.
Newman wasn’t that kind of actor. He saw directors as collaborators rather than dictators, or, at the very least, therapists who could help him find the psychological essence of his characters. Their collaboration, Torn Curtain, was the perfect storm of mismatched talents, time constraints, and poor screenwriting, and neither of them seemed interested in salvaging it.
Hitchcock didn’t want Newman to play the male lead in the 1966 espionage thriller, nor did he want Mary Poppins (AKA Julie Andrews) to play the female lead. Unfortunately for him, Hollywood had moved on from Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, and Newman and Andrews were the hottest stars in town. Like it or not, he had to take them, and quickly, because Andrews’s schedule was tight.
The script was written hastily and poorly, which made Newman even less clear about who his character was than he normally would have been. So he did what he usually did: asked the director. Unfortunately, Hitch had no respect for this sort of due diligence. Reflecting on these uncomfortable interactions years later, the filmmaker wrote, “I thought to myself: ‘What does it matter about your character? It’s just going to be Paul Newman anyway’.” Ouch.
In retaliation (or simply at a loss), the actor turned in one of his most wooden performances. What could have been a cinephile’s dream collaboration turned into one of the least inspired films of both Newman and Hitchcock’s careers, a match made in heaven that turned into a notorious lost opportunity.
