Method man with the blues

Biography/Paul Newman By Daniel O'Brien: Lauren Bacall's waspish comments about Nicole Kidman - not a legend, just a star - …

Biography/Paul Newman By Daniel O'Brien: Lauren Bacall's waspish comments about Nicole Kidman - not a legend, just a star - have given rise to a gleeful round of list-making and name-swapping in the global film buff community. In his new biography of Paul Newman, Daniel O'Brien details his subject's film career with an eye on much the same argument, writes Ruth Barton

Was Newman ever anything more than a famously startling pair of blue eyes (colour blind, apparently) and the kind of physique that photographed particularly well in gleaming white duds?

From the beginnings of his long life in cinema and intermittent stage appearances, Newman found himself up against a generation of beautiful losers all circling around the same parts. James Dean, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift epitomised a kind of masculinity that articulated a generation's alienation from the values of wartime and the post-war espousal of white, suburban, consumer culture. Introspective to the point of self-obsession, their reputations, particularly Brando's, have become inseparable from that of Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio and the tenets of Method acting. No longer were actors supposed to impersonate characters, they had to personify them, to reach inside themselves and engage emotionally with the fictional individuals they portrayed on screen. Newman enrolled in the Studio in 1953 and retained a lifelong association with it; in later life it was the beneficiary of some of his income from salad dressings and other extensive fund raisers and in 1988, after Strasberg's death, he seems to have exercised right of patronage to block Madonna's acceptance to the studio and to have Ellen Burstyn replaced as artistic director.

If Newman is to be seen as an exemplary Method actor, then understanding his biographical background ought to provide key insights into his performances. Hence, O'Brien dwells in some detail on his subject's tense relations with his father and speculates on how the death from drug abuse in 1978 of Newman's troubled son from his first marriage, Scott, influenced his subsequent roles. Specifically, he suggests that the pairing of Newman with Tom Cruise in The Color of Money was a wistful invocation of a father-son relationship that had never happened. The difficulty is that O'Brien does not seem to have had direct access to Newman or Joanne Woodward, his wife and sometime co-star. Instead he has had to rely on press kits, newspaper coverage and other biographies to eke out his research. None of these sources, or the DVD commentaries he has consulted, seems to have yielded anything other than formulaic remarks from Newman or his collaborators.

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The occasional insights Newman's biographer does gain into his subject's private life are oddly mundane. The star and his wife mostly avoid celebrity parties but when they do attend, she likes to bring along her knitting - not quite the kind of off-screen behaviour we expect of legends. Newman's ancillary career as an international racing driver is a little more to the point and, throughout, the book hints at a more dynamic and excessive personality. In the absence of any truly momentous revelations, however, O'Brien has produced a solid account of Newman's film career, one that divides rather neatly into the many worthy projects initiated and occasionally directed by the actor (box-office disasters), and escapist fluff (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Towering Inferno), films that have cemented his iconic status as the epitome of cool. The more, it seems, Newman churned out gritty dramas about mental illness, abuse and, in his own words, "the life of simple Americans", the further he drifted from the public eye and the studios' casting calls. Yet, one freeze frame of a pair of doomed outlaws diving off a cliff in a hail of bullets has come to stand in for a cultural moment in a manner that no-one involved in that production could have imagined.

Star or legend? In the end, O'Brien bows out of the selection process, defeated by his central character's reticence. He leaves us instead with a clearly written account of the production and reception of Newman's body of films and of his stage work. The book closes with Road to Perdition and a performance that for my money brought its subject the closest he has come to legend status.

Ruth Barton is O'Kane Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Film Studies, University College, Dublin. Her latest book, Irish National Cinema, was published recently by Routledge

Paul Newman By Daniel O'Brien Faber & Faber, 362pp. £17.99