The feud between Alfred Hitchcock and Paul Newman: “He decided not to turn up”
It’s hard to name two Hollywood legends as big as Alfred Hitchcock and Paul Newman, but just because they shared a similarly outsized presence in the industry does not mean they were destined to have creative synergy. When Newman was cast in the director’s 1966 espionage thriller Torn Curtain, neither of them were particularly happy about it, and things got worse from there.
To begin with, Hitchcock didn’t want Newman in the film, but Universal insisted on it. Newman was a huge star, and the studio was determined that he played the lead role of a scientist attempting to steal Soviet secrets. The director was equally annoyed with the studio’s choice of leading lady, Julie Andrews. After decades of favouring icy blonde sex symbols, Hitchcock found himself forking over a sizable portion of his budget to the actor who had scored double box office successes with Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music.
The main bone of contention between Hitchcock and his leading man was that the director was used to working with a certain type of star. Jimmy Stewart was his go-to, and Cary Grant had become a favourite as well. Both actors were stars in the most classic sense. They took acting seriously, but they were creatures of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Their characters were always an extension of their own stardom, and Hitchcock rarely created parts that needed deep psychological excavation. In the few movies where he did – Vertigo and Marnie in particular – he tended to side-step any opportunities to delve into the characters as much as was required to make narrative sense.
In contrast, Newman was a Method actor. He needed to know the motivations of his characters and he needed time to develop them. Unfortunately for everyone, time was a commodity they did not have. Because of Andrews’ busy schedule (she was the most in-demand star in Hollywood at the time), the script was far from polished when they started shooting, and everyone involved seemed to recognise that the production was not shaping up to be the next North by Northwest.
On several occasions, Newman enraged Hitchcock by criticising the script and asking for clarification about his character. “His character!” the director wrote later. “[I] thought to myself: ‘What does it matter about your character? It’s just going to be Paul Newman anyway.’”
In a letter to his unlikely pal Joan Crawford, Hitchcock made another cutting remark about his leading man. “You asked what had happened to Paul Newman. I can only think that being a method actor he decided not to turn up for the latter part of the film.”
Not surprisingly, given all this tension, Torn Curtain was a low point in the careers of all involved. It had the potential to be a highlight – Alfred Hitchcock doing a Cold War-era James Bond knock-off starring two of Hollywood’s most popular and charismatic young actors had a good ring to it. But instead, thanks to a messy script and a clash of personalities, it became more of a spoof of Hitchcock’s previous work than anything else.
Despite the tension with his director, Newman struck a much more magnanimous tone in retrospect. “I think Hitch and I could have really hit it off,” he said. “But the script kept getting in the way.”
His perspective sounds even kinder with hindsight given the fact that Hitchcock was over the hill as a filmmaker at that point. He would never reach the heights of his previous work again, he couldn’t use Newman as the excuse.
