The role Paul Newman was adamant he “would not go to my grave” without playing
There comes a time in every veteran actor’s life when they realise they’re running out of time to accomplish everything they want in their career, and despite achieving more than most performers could ever dream of, Paul Newman still had some unfinished business in his twilight years.
A ten-time Academy Award nominee, one-time winner, the recipient of two honorary Oscars, and a seven-time Golden Globe victor with a Primetime Emmy win and two Grammy nominations who was known as one of his generation’s best and one of American cinema’s all-time greats shouldn’t be left harbouring too many regrets when the end was drawing near, but Newman wasn’t done.
His last live-action appearance in a feature film came in 2002’s Road to Perdition, his final live-action performance arrived three years later in HBO’s miniseries, Empire Falls, and his swansong was a voice-only turn in Pixar’s Cars in 2006, after which he confirmed his retirement from acting.
He went out with a bang, too, claiming his last Oscar nomination for Sam Mendes’ crime thriller and winning a Golden Globe and an Emmy for the two-part event he also executive produced was a fitting way to go out, but Newman couldn’t draw a line under his long association with acting without bidding a proper farewell to his first love.
Like countless others of his era who’d go on to become all-time greats, he cut his teeth treading the boards, with Newman a regular presence on Broadway from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. However, when his big-screen career started to take off, he left it behind, with a 1964 run of James Costigan’s Baby, Want a Kiss? the last time he’d perform on stage for 38 years.
He hadn’t set foot on the stage for nearly four decades, but in late 2002, he made his long-awaited, hotly-anticipated, and well-overdue comeback. Tackling the lead role of the stage manager in Thornton Wilder’s metatextual masterpiece, Our Town, Newman told UPI that it was the final item remaining on his bucket list.
“I decided I would not go to my grave without coming back to Broadway,” he said. “There is no other reason, except that Our Town reflects the best of American values, and I thought it appropriate for these times. The play questions what we do with our time. How we use it. The things that we ought to be looking at, and that we forget to look at. How gloriously special getting through the day ought to be.”
With that in mind, it was almost the perfect production. Newman was 77 years old when his nine-week run of Our Town began, the play’s themes applied to his current outlook on life, he’d recently wrapped his last-ever movie, he knew that retirement was in his near future, he hadn’t been on Broadway in almost 40 years, and the production originated at the Westport Country Playhouse before heading to New York, where Joanne Woodward served as the artistic director.
It would have been the ideal way to cap off his stage days, apart from the fact he was back at it again two years later, playing the title character in Trumbo for Woodward’s Westport repertory.
