The one role Paul Newman regretting playing every single day: “I wasn’t cutting the mustard”
Good actors are self-aware enough to know that they’re good actors, but they aren’t always smart enough to avoid roles they’re completely ill-suited to play. Paul Newman made that mistake once, and he regretted it for every single day of the production.
Every star has their strengths and weaknesses, and in Newman’s case, he thrived when he was playing complicated characters with a mischievous streak who enjoyed operating in shades of grey. That’s not to say he couldn’t do anything else, but there were certain parts he should have known he couldn’t pull off.
The Hollywood icon starred in a few period pieces during his career, and one of them, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, is among the finest he ever made. However, one of the few things Newman wasn’t great at was accents, and it didn’t take him long to realise he’d made a massive professional faux pas.
Based on Romain Gary’s novel of the same name, 1965’s Lady L unfolds in the early 20th century, with Sophia Loren cast as an elderly lady of high society, Lady Louise Lendale, who decamps to her summer home with a biographer in tow so that she can begin detailing her life story, which is where Newman comes in.
His Parisian anarchist and thief, Armand Denis, was the first love of her life, and they had a child together. However, she ended up spending 50 years of her life with David Niven’s Lord Lendale, all while her first flame was actually her husband all along and the father of all her children, not to mention posing as the family’s chauffeur to stay close.
It wasn’t the best use of Newman’s talents, to put it lightly. For one thing, he looked ridiculous playing the older version of Armand, which required him to wear a thoroughly unconvincing wig and fake beard. Newman and Loren had no chemistry, and the former wasn’t interested in trying to foster any.
In fact, writer and director Peter Ustinov recalled that in an attempt to create a connection between them that would translate to the screen, Loren’s stab at making small talk away from the cameras didn’t go too well when she asked Newman how the makeup team had attached his stupid-looking fake beard to his face. Knowing that it was a stupid-looking fake beard, he issued a one-word response: “Sperm.”
The picture was a critical and commercial bust, and while he could have swept it under the rug and moved on if he wanted to, the leading man shouldered the entirety of the blame. “Anything wrong with Lady L was the fault of Paul Newman,” he said. “I have a very American skin, and when I try to go out of my skin, I go wrong.”
Almost 20 years later, when Time quizzed him on a movie he’d rather forget, Newman conceded that it was doomed from the start: “I woke up every morning and knew I wasn’t cutting the mustard,” he acknowledged, and he was right, since Lady L is comfortably one of the weakest and most forgettable features he was ever in.
