The love story of actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward is unique in the Hollywood firmament. Married for 50 years until Newman’s death in September 2008, they were also indefatigable collaborators, making 16 films together (many of which Newman directed). Two works that came out last year shed new light on their admirable, complicated relationship. The Last Movie Stars, a six-part HBO Max documentary about the couple, directed by Ethan Hawke and executive-produced by Martin Scorsese, brought to life a treasure trove of interviews conducted by the writer Stewart Stern with Newman, Woodward, and many of the key figures in their lives. These interviews also form the basis of The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, Newman’s riveting posthumous memoir. Often sanctified and sanitised as the dream Hollywood couple, the documentary and the book reveal new depths, edges and vulnerabilities that make them even more intriguing and humane.
Born in Shaker Heights, Ohio on January 26, 1925, Paul Leonard Newman was the son of a Jewish father and a Roman Catholic mother who ran a sports shop together. Newman described his father as a “very expensive violin with a lot of broken strings”. After briefly attending Ohio University, Paul joined the U.S. Navy during world war II. In 1945 he survived a kamikaze attack on the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill because the pilot to which Newman was assigned as a radioman-gunner had earache, so he and his crew were grounded — an early example of the ‘Newman’s luck’ that would shape his early life. In 1949 he
