‘Hud’: The Oscar-nominated performance Paul Newman called “a big mistake”
Just because a performance is recognised by the most prestigious awards ceremony on the calendar as one of the best given by any actor in the preceding 12 months, it doesn’t mean the person who gave it is obligated to agree. For proof, look no further than Academy Awards mainstay Paul Newman.
After notching his first nomination for ‘Best Actor’ for playing Brick Pollitt in 1958’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Newman became a fixture of the Oscars shortlists. In fact, the 1970s was the only decade of his career when he wasn’t in the running for a prize between the 1950s and the 2000s, underlining his consistency as one of the best around.
The recurring theme of the iconic star’s association with the ceremony was that he was always the bridesmaid and never the bride, having accrued six ‘Best Actor’ nods without winning – and a seventh nomination for ‘Best Picture’ after producing his feature-length directorial debut Rachel, Rachel – making him one of the unluckiest names in Hollywood.
Good things often come to those who wait, though, and reprising the role of The Hustler‘s Eddie Felson in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money finally landed him the big one at the seventh time of asking. Ironically, it came a year after Newman had technically landed that elusive first Oscar when he was awarded an honorary gong for his overall contributions to cinema, but a maiden competitive statue was the icing on a cake he’d spent his entire professional life baking.
The actor landed eight acting nominations, one for his filmmaking endeavours, and was bestowed with two honorific Oscars, but he didn’t think he deserved all of them. One performance in particular was a source of frustration for Newman in the years to come after he admitted to The New York Times that his turn as the title character in 1963’s Hud was “a big mistake.”
“I wanted Hud to have all the external graces: to be lean, hungry, a great brawler, a swordsman, a rascal in the most enjoyable sense, and rotten to the core,” he said. “What the audience bought was all the external graces. The fact is, he was rotten. But he became a folk hero. We wanted him to be Richard III.”
Director Martin Ritt’s western saw Newman playing an arrogant, self-obsessed, hard-living, lazy, and womanising son of a steadfast rancher. Hud has plenty of ambition, but he’s not all that interested in putting in the hard yards to realise it. The leading man wanted to shine a light on the character’s darker side, only to discover that he was embraced as a charismatic antihero instead.
It wasn’t ideal from his perspective that his approach to the part was either completely missed by critics and crowds or interpreted in a wildly different way, but it was still a good enough performance to place him in the thick of the Oscars race, although he came up empty-handed thanks to a history-making Sidney Poitier.
