How Paul Newman incited a strike at the Cannes Film Festival: “The most important lesson”
The Cannes Film Festival has often courted controversy. It has a long history of screening divisive films, and it regularly welcomes contentious figures. It has been a key supporter of Roman Polanski’s career, screening his films as recently as 2017. Another notorious moment came in 2011 when Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier was banned from the festival for his inflammatory statements about Nazis during a press conference for Melancholia.
Much of the frenzied press that comes out of Cannes is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is one of the most covered events in the world, with an average of 4,500 journalists attending each year. With that many people running around with cameras and microphones, stories are bound to happen.
In 1954, for example, several members of the paparazzi sustained injuries while falling over each other to take photographs of Simone Silva, a French-Egyptian actor who was posing topless with Robert Mitchum. The festival committee was appalled by the incident and sent Silva packing.
Of all the people you might think would cause controversy, Paul Newman isn’t near the top of the list. He didn’t have a reputation for putting his foot in his mouth during interviews, and he certainly wasn’t contending with accusations of paedophilia or Nazi sympathising. He wasn’t even prone to press stunts. He generally hated fame and avoided interviews and public appearances at all costs.
As it turns out, that press avoidance was his cardinal sin as far as Cannes was concerned. In 1975, he attended the festival and was in no mood to pose for photographs, thanks to all the exhausting travel he’d had to endure to get there. The photographers were none too pleased with this attitude.
That evening, when the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid star did the obligatory ‘Climbing of the Steps’ on the famous red carpet where most of the photos are taken, the photographers laid down their cameras and turned their backs on him. For obvious reasons, it’s very hard to find a photo of this moment, but it must have been a sight to behold. According to the official Cannes website, Newman was appalled by his own behaviour, saying later that “it was the most important lesson he’d ever learned.”
Unlike Silva, however, he was not banned from the festival, nor was he so upset by the strike that he refused to come back. He returned multiple times over the years, including for the premiere of his 1987 film The Glass Menagerie, which he directed. The photographers had no qualms about photographing him on that occasion.
In 1983, Isabelle Adjani incited a similar incident. After winning a double award for ‘Best Actress’ at the festival two years before for the classic horror film Possession and the Merchant Ivory romance Quartet, she refused to pose for photos after a press conference in protest over press intrusion into her private life. When she ascended the famous red stairs, the photographers did their old trick of laying their cameras down and turning their backs. In another universe, they might have simply apologised for their aggressive coverage of her daily life.
