HOLLYWOOD ACTOR PREP by Dana Kaminski

“Matt Damon Is A Journeyman [Actor].”

That’s what Morgan Freeman said, in the NY Times article that I quoted yesterday. One professional actor, commenting on the work of another. Dennis Lim, the author of the piece, considered what Freeman said about Damon, a compliment. Why, do you think, Lim recognized it as such?

–Click to  read referenced Hollywood Actor Prep post.–

Then, Morgan Freeman said, “He always gets the job done. There’s no strain in his work.”

For me, that’s huge. This simple sentence describes, in very few words, a very high level of quality, of acting. One of the rarest and finest attributes an actor can be able to pull off. Oddly, it’s one of those acting traits, that is assumed, expected; but that you rarely see, in performance. Not often noted, by critics, yet it doesn’t require an eye of a connoisseur. It sounds so simple, even the description is as simple as can be; yet, it is something that not only is not found often, and is very hard to do (!), but many actors don’t seem to be aware of this higher standard. Often, it doesn’t appear to be attempted.

Most actors, and I do mean, most; are very busy “acting”. Performing. With very visible “acting” and “performing”. The “acting-without-strain” that Freeman mentions, is a rarely talked-about, written-about discernment, but it’s profoundly different, in terms of acting artistry. In terms of quality of acting, complexity, and ability. It’s a subtle difference, perhaps, but very different.

There are two important effects that occur when there is “no strain”.  (I usually use another word: “seamless”.  Another term is un-self-conscious acting.)

It allows more room for the story. The script then becomes the central focus, rather than the acting, or the actor.  In order to get there, the actor has to honor the writer, the script and the story, the whole project, more than his or her own ego. (I could describe this with more finesse, I just don’t have time!  See prior post …)

I’d guess, that the audience is more involved, then, as well. Audience participation may be silent; but it is their active participation in the story, that is the goal of every production, any kind.

What do you think about Morgan Freeman’s statement? Comment here, tell me on Twitter…I’ll probably set up a forum soon, so we can get into this. I’ll write more throughout this week, too.

Best,

;~Dana

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Lee Daniels Directed Precious.

As I watched the movie, I was floored by moment-after-moment truth. Real.

Real acting, I mean. The authentic kind. The only kind.

The RARE kind.  Rare-st kind.  Also, the highest-level kind. Specifically, the kind that makes acting an art form.

It’s the only kind, in my book.  Otherwise, it’s not acting. It’s pretending to act.

Let’s Start With The Unlikely Actors And Acting In The Movie Precious

Unlikely, because of the three that I will mention, just this time around, not one of them came by way of being a trained and experienced actor.

Additionally unlikely, because they are, all three, in absolute danger of doing the worst kind of acting of all.  Yet they did the opposite.

Let’s start with Mo’Nique. Last night, the director Lee Daniels, called her: “The Queen Of BET” for her Live At The Apollo fame. I am familiar with the onstage Mo’Nique, isn’t everyone?

Mo’Nique is a household name, and a household personality. Her personality is what brings home the fame. She’s notorious for that moxy, the outrageously bold statements, the flirtatious blunt sexual-speak, tactless assessments, and claws-out skinny-girl bashing.  Yeah, you’re right, that’s  as real as can be.

It’s also a performance. A persona.  Many people that have public personas, don’t get out of them. When coaching acting, it’s sometimes hard to get into a person with a persona to not only drop it for the truth of the character they are playing…but, as I’ve said elsewhere in this blog, it’s often hard to get them to be able to understand or decipher the difference.  Between their onstage or public persona, and authentic acting. Sometimes, it’s hard to get them to decipher a difference between their real selves and their persona.

Comedy Success Can Sometimes Make Authentic Acting Impossible

Set-up, joke; set-up, joke; set-up, joke, joke, joke.

Two things wrong with that, and that’s just for a start. One is that it’s all ‘external’, done for effect. Polished, over time, for effect.  Done for ‘result’. There’s no way to be inside a character, in a ‘private place’, where your emotions can move and flow freely; if you are focused on the metronomic beats of the line, and if you are trying to get a result.

If you are on the outside looking on at your performance, then you are not in it enough to give an authentic performance.

Stand up comics are experienced in getting a laugh. That can be oppositional to being real, in acting.  When a result is played for, by the actor; then the audience just watches, instead of experiencing the result for themselves.

This is all a bit complicated. I don’t really want  to spend a whole lot of time explaining this now.  I have in the past, and will do so in the future. Just know that Mo’Nique should be nominated for an Oscar. She was superb. Not just because she was able to avoid the traps that hinder almost every comedian-turned-actor you can name.  But because characterization was wonderful, and her acting was so damn real.

Number Two Actor is Gabourey Sidibe Who Plays The Role Of Precious.

Not an actor.  She was not experienced. Start there?

I don’t know how to explain this; except that this actress has an unusually high amount of sensitivity, channeling power, and natural acting ability. She also was a Psych major, and I have always thought there were similarities between the professions of acting, and psychology.

May I please reveal that before I met the director and his leading lady, I had a chip on my shoulder. I assumed that Gabourey Sidibe was just a real person that he had cast because she looked like the Precious that Lee had in mind. That, and since he had also cast Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz, that he really didn’t respect actors at all.  Once I saw the film, I was flipped upside down. My strong assumptions, that is.

Last night, I learned that they had, in fact, searched far and wide for a real Precious to play the onscreen Precious.  They went across the country.  They eventually found more than 400. Precious-Potentials, that is.

The director, Lee Daniels, stated that he lost count after that.  They recruited girls from public transportation, from inside different McDonald’s on both coasts. He described something called “Precious Camp”, where some prospectives were put through auditioning levels, and some training. He said they were all very great Preciouses-Plural.  The difference between all 400 plus wonderful Precious-castables, and Gabourney (Gabby) Sidibe, wasn’t acting experience.

None of them had any acting experience. (He had auditioned plenty of actresses who did have experience, long before he went on the cross-country search.)

However, they all were very capable. And, in the end, he was sorry to let all of those other ones go.

Because Of Acting.

But, during the very first meeting with Gabby Sidibe; a meeting that, by the way, she really wasn’t interested in going to, and was prodded by a friend who was also going…It was during that first meeting that he knew what she didn’t even know. The director experienced it at a specific moment, that she was an actor.

He described it clearly, and …

Well. I will tell you tomorrow…. [To Be Continued, Manana.]

Best,

;~Dana

One important note on status change here.  There is now a fee. The charge of each article is to send it to someone else, or post it on your Facebook page. Retweeting is negotiable as far as payment. Thanks for sharing this forward…

I remember Jason Ritter’s acting work,  from the few times that I saw the television show ‘Joan Of Arcadia’. He was the guy in the wheelchair, who had once been a jock. If you saw the film, ‘W’, by Oliver Stone, then you may remember him as the actor who played Jeb Bush.

Currently, he appears in ‘The Education of  Charlie Banks’. He’s cast as a bully, and it’s a different kind of role for him. In this interview; he divulges the acting challenges, and personal issues, that came with this acting role…And, the way he handled them.

From the Los Angeles Times, By Michael Ordoña 

 

 

The son of late actor John Ritter tackles the role of a bully in ‘Charlie Banks’

“We all have bullies in our lives and we just assume they’re evil, but largely I think that kind of behavior comes from somewhere,” says Jason Ritter, who plays a neighborhood tough who commits an almost psychopathically vicious act in “The Education of Charlie Banks.” “Certainly the bully in my life, as far as I could tell, the house he grew up in was completely devoid of any love. He had all the money in the world, but you walk around his house and it was cold like a museum. So the only reaction he could get out of people was fear. It made him laugh.”

With neat, close-cropped hair and a scruffy in-progress beard like a cross between G.I. Joe and the Unabomber, the 29-year-old projects an inoffensiveness in person that makes his transformation in the movie all the more impressive. The brutal act perpetrated by his bulldozer-in-a-china-shop Mick is witnessed by sheltered uptown boy Charlie (Jesse Eisenberg). Mick then turns up years later in Charlie’s dorm room, insinuating himself into a life of privilege amid the well-to-do students. 

“The challenges were consistent with my worst nightmare of how I’m perceived,” he said at his publicist’s West Hollywood offices. It wasn’t that the character was so objectionable but so unlike him: “I generally care very much what other people think of me. I’m not proud of that trait.

“I had to start from the very beginning and ask, ‘What kind of man ends up so out of control that he can’t help but ruin his own chances at being anything?’ This was definitely one of my most challenging roles.” 

The son of the late actor John Ritter acknowledges he’s known for playing “innocent, nice guys”; his background was a lot closer to Charlie’s than Mick’s.

 

“When the script first was circulating, I auditioned for Charlie,” he admits. Years after that production fell apart, the screenplay came around again. Thinking himself now too old for Charlie, he took a furtive stab at Mick. To his surprise, he got the part. “There was a huge part of me that was terrified and thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, I tricked them!’ “ 

To pull off the guise of a guy who never questions his actions but moves with a shark-like decisiveness, Ritter had to face down a couple of demons.

“I had to find a whole lot of confidence somewhere,” he says with a slightly nervous laugh. “I’m always second-guessing myself. He never apologizes and I never cease apologizing.” 

The cast, especially love interest Eva Amurri, helped him settle into this rough and uncomfortable skin.

“The first time you see her talking to Mick in the bar, she’s sort of jittery and excited,” he says, compared to her cool when dealing with the madly infatuated Charlie. That enabled Ritter “to lean back in my chair and say, ‘Oh, yeah. Mick doesn’t have the problems Jason has when talking to women.’

“I was also lucky [the cast and crew] believed I could pull this off. I’ve done other things where there was a producer somewhere going,” he exhales in exasperation and rolls his eyes. “As much confidence as I had to pretend I had, it would have taken just one person to say, ‘I don’t buy it’ to let it all drain out. It was such a delicate thing for me.”

Not exactly an imposing figure, Ritter decided to use his physicality and clean-cut appearance to his advantage.

“I’ve never been in a fistfight in my whole life. I don’t have a giant scar on my face; I don’t look like a tough guy. [But] Mick had to be able to blend in with the college kids; he had to look almost normal. The only thing keeping him from normal was that you had seen this violent act at the beginning,” he says.

The actor felt a kinship with the character (“We’re disgusted by the same things”), believing he understood Mick. The question was whether it was too late for Mick to change.

“It’s hard when the only thing stopping you from everything you want is your own inner workings.”

 

 

Ready For Your Acting Luck

No one is really lucky, without participating.  No one has luck in professional acting, without being primed and ready for it.

As an art form, acting is unique; because actors can’t just start making their art themselves.  They need someone to hire them.

That’s a drag… that actors need to wait for someone to hire them first.  
But, if you use that as a reason to do nothing; then you may have nothing, in the end.

If you think someone is just going to see you, as you walk into an audition, and hand you the acting job…you aren’t operating in the acting profession that is in Los Angeles.

The definition of an acting career includes a professional level of standards. Every professional field has standards; this one does, too.  There is an expected level of abilities, of skill.  

A professional anyone is assumed to be able to provide a high level of skill, at any time needed.

When Luck Strikes…

Actors can view a lucky break in  one of two ways:

1. You have little or no training or skill and you hope that luck strikes you at an audition so that you can do what is needed to make you look like you know what you are doing.
2. You know what you are doing, and you hope that you get the a lucky opportunity to show it off.

In case you don’t know it, only number two is the professional kind of luck.  (Lucky break #1 can easily turn into unlucky and notorious Getting Fired #1.)

How can you participate in your luck?  Numerous ways.  Some easy and some hard.

There’s no easy shortcuts for the hard ones, though.  You may try and offer some, many have tried before. You may, even, be able to get someone famous to send you on an audition…but if you aren’t ready, you won’t get the job.  

Even, if you’re at the Hollywood Ralph’s and you meet a top casting director in the checkout line … and he, instantly,  wants to marry you…you can control whether or not to get hitched, but you won’t have any influence on if you get an acting job. You won’t.

Not if you aren’t honed and ready for it.

Art + Work = Process

Luck, truly, only happens to those who are ready.  Those who respect acting as an art form, and who are willing to commit to doing the work it takes to have a reliable technique.

Since acting is an art, it’s never finished.  It’s always a process…an evolution of better skills,  increasing dimensions of skills, the facility when using skills…the easy accessibility of your skills.

But, the process can’t evolve unless you decide to do it, and consistently. This is something that should be ongoing, a necessary work-ethic, as an actor; but if you haven’t been doing “upkeep”, then you can simply start today. Even a little bit…

And make it a priority, to do it everyday.  And, work harder, so that your acting skills are at an even-higher level than they were before.  “Up” that, challenge that level. If you can say yes to: “Are you working on your process, regularly?”  then you can know that you are doing the prep you need. 

Part of an actor’s job, is to challenge him or herself.  

And, yes, that is the tough part, it takes ongoing, continual discipline.  Ongoing commitment. Even when you don’t feel like it.  The toughest challenge can be that inner-voice that tells you that “you don’t want to”, or says: “not right now”…

Are you challenging your own “chops”?  

If you are, then you are making sure that you are ready for luck.  You are open, too, for luck to happen.

Getting A Mojo On Par

Here’s a few ways:

1. Work on a scene immediately. If you aren’t in a class, join one.
2. Go to the Actors Studio, if you are a member…or any acting group of any kind, and participate; maniacally.    (And when you aren’t actively participating, actively listen and learn.)
3. Do your stand-up routine, at a club, if you have one.
4. Work on a new piece from any script, review some old things; anything and everything, every day.
5. Get in a performance any kind,  to renew your ease of performing in front of people.  If no chance of anything else, you can read to kids at your local school.
6. Take on some Shakespeare, even if you’ve never tried it before; to get facile with different ways of speaking character-work, and lines…and most especially, with making them come to life. Making them real. 
7. Get a monologue, online, and perfect it.  Make sure you put on the appropriate clothes (costume) to rehearse it in.  Make sure you do all your script interpretation, and your character prep.

Luck that doesn’t quit, in professional actor terms, really means possessing  acting skills that you, and everyone else; especially those that hire you, can count on.  That you can build your career on.

Talent vs Ability

Many people are afraid to act, even if they want to; they say “How do I know if I really have any talent??!”

“What if I have been thinking that I am all that, and then I have an opportunity to show it…only to discover that ______?” 

Acting Skill + Practice

There’s two reasons, that I can think of, right off the bat, as to why you should, constantly, be upping-the-bar of your acting skill abilities.

1. Obviously: because you want to be good.  You want to look like you know what you are doing, and you DO want to be able to know what you are doing…right?      

…On cue, that is,  when required by whatever script you are working on.  You want to have the facility to call on your “acting chops”, at will, and when needed.  You want such skills, that when you have an audition and are working a script… you are able to do whatever is required.  

Right then and there; on stage or in front of an enormous camera right in your face with a hundred crew members all quiet and staring at you, and a big star feeding you your lines because it is your close-up…etc.

2. You want to do it, also, because solid skill-building is something you can gage. You can keep track, and assess, with an accuracy that isn’t based on a feeling or hope…as you work, especially in a class,  you can really start to see how well you improve on doing what is required in the parts you work on.

Then, when  life serves up the “logic vs art” argument; and being an actor starts to lose sense (!), or depression and doubt overtake.   Separately, or in tandem, with life’s general struggles…With skills, you’ve got a inner core–something existant and solid, that doesn’t get diminished by all that harsh stuff.

Acting Skill Mastery

Skill-building, in acting, is like playing an instrument.  But the instrument isn’t something you touch or hold in your hands, it’s inside.  Same principal, though.  Continual work, continual practice makes mastery.

That mastery is what you take to performance.  And that mastery is what keeps you feeling adequate, and more.  Just the continual building and working on, toward the mastery, is what you: not only take to performance; but something that gives you, yourself, the credibility you may need to keep the faith, in your art, in your place in it.

Even if your teeth are chattering from fear, and you doubt whether what you thought was talent, before, was actually insanity…you will be able to still play like a maestro.

That is, if you have been practicing and working on your skill level, all along. 

Best,

:-Dana

Calling It Acting Work, Or Calling It Art

I found this on YouTube.  Gary Oldman talks about character, and gives an overall view of his acting focus. 

You can get a sense, when watching this, of why he has the freedom to be be so good.  So “real”. 

Good acting can flow, only, with a certain discipline; it’s like a rudder on a ship…This, professionally, keeps a necessary perspective.  And, turns the work, from work, to art.    Over time, I’ll go into this with more specificity and detail.

Paul Newman was an authentic actor, a real actor.  He was, so thoroughly, the “real deal”; that no amount of looks, or fame, or anything else that can taint a pure talent…ever tainted his.  Same goes for his character: the “real solid deal”, untainted.

It’s impossible to fathom just how powerful that talent, and that integrity, would have to be.  That he had. And it survived, endured flawlessly, for 82 years.  

Mindblowing.   

A beautiful human being, with an almost inhuman strength of character; and one of the finest talents we have ever had. He made us all look good.

His Early Experiences, and How He Handled Them

Today, on The Huffington Post, I found a blog written by Danny Miller.   It not only goes stylistically with this blog, but it talks about Paul Newman’s early career, both early wins and some surprise stings. (No pun intended; but I love the accident…!)

I put excerpts of that blog here, along with the videos. Oh, those videos!  Paul Newman had such skills.

Read on, for his early experiences, early flops, (even about an ad that he took in Variety that begged people not to go and see his a film he was in!) and lots that I think  those with acting careers, can certainly relate to. 

From “Remembering Paul Newman’s Early Career”:

Paul Newman

 

“I’ve repeatedly said that for people with as little in common as Joanne and myself, we have an uncommonly good marriage. We are actors. We make pictures and that’s about all we have in common. Maybe that’s enough. Wives shouldn’t feel obligated to accompany their husbands to a ball game, husbands do look a bit silly attending morning coffee breaks with the neighborhood wives when most men are out at work. Husbands and wives should have separate interests, cultivate different sets of friends and not impose on the other…You can’t spend a lifetime breathing down each other’s necks.”

 

“I never ask my wife about my flaws. Instead I try to get her to ignore them and concentrate on my sense of humor. You don’t want any woman to look under the carpet, guys, because there’s lots of flaws underneath. Joanne believes my character in a film we did together, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Bridge’ comes closest to who I really am. I personally don’t think there’s one character who comes close…but I learned a long time ago not to disagree on things that I don’t have a solid opinion about.”

 

Paul Newman :: Joanne Woodward

 

 

 

When someone of Paul Newman’s stature dies, there is so much written about the whole of their career. I always like to dip into the archives to their earliest days in the public eye and see how they were viewed before they were swept up into the fame machine.

 

Reading about Paul Newman when he was a very young man, the good news is that his personality seems the same as it was after achieving enormous success. But like many stars, Newman was almost done in by his first brush with big fame. After appearing in a few small roles on television, Newman got his first big break in the original Broadway production of William Inge’s “Picnic” in 1953. He wasn’t the male lead, the dangerous drifter played by William Holden in the film version, but he had a good part as the drifter’s rich college friend, Alan, who was also in love with the town beauty, Madge.

 

With his crazy good looks and the acting technique he developed at the Actors Studio, Newman was soon fielding offers from the Hollywood studios. They sent him script after script, and to his eternal regret, the one that he finally accepted was the religious epic, “The Silver Chalice.” This abomination, in which Newman played the artist who was given the task of designing the chalice that would house the Holy Grail, also starred Virginia Mayo, Pier Angeli, and Jack Palance. Newman got the full studio build-up. A 1954 L.A. times article breathlessly announced:

 

Warner Bros. Is evidently successfully combing Broadway for talent for top film assignments. Having already secured James Dean to play opposite Julie Harris in “East of Eden,” the studio has now acquired Paul Newman for the pivotal role of Basil in “The Silver Chalice.”

Following his arrival in Los Angeles, Hedda Hopper weighed in about the influx of young New York talent.

—-Got quite a shock when I walked into the Green Room at Warners for lunch. Hadn’t been there in quite a spell, so maybe I was expecting some of the glamour stars that graced the studio not too long ago–people like Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Ann Sheridan, Humphrey Bogart, Jim Cagney, Jane Wyman.

The place was jumping all right, but a new set of actors had taken over. It’s what I call the Dirty Shirttail School of Acting. Against a wall sat two boys, James Dean and Richard Davalos, one slouched down on his coccyx. They balanced forks on water glasses, got extra chairs on which to rest their feet, and gave the appearance of a couple of Roman soliders resting up from the wars, not getting up when a female entered the room.

Was about to tackle my lamb chops when in walked what looked like a sensible Marlon Brando. He was Paul Newman, who costars with Virginia Mayo in “the Silver Chalice.” I asked how he got to look so much like Marlon. “I’m a chronic sloucher,” he replied.

Then Miss Glamour herself, Virginia Mayo, joined us. Pointing to her costar she said, “He’s the best-looking thing in a toga you’ve ever seen–I call him ‘Skirts Newman.’”

“But he has no hair on his chest,” I commented. I wanted to know how the Cleveland-born Newman became an actor. “This,” he said, “is where you find out a person is abnormal. I gave up a secure life in the sporting goods business for acting.”—–

 Newman’s first film was savaged by the critics. The New York Times reviewer called it cumbersome and creaking. “Paul Newman, a recruit from Broadway, bears a striking resemblance to Marlon Brando, but his contribution is hardly outstanding. As a youth who has been cheated of his rich inheritance by a covetous uncle, sold into slavery, and eventually chosen to create the Holy relic, he is given mainly to thoughtful posing and automatic speechmaking. And, despite the fact that he is desired by the extremely fetching Mayo and the wistful Angeli, he is rarely better than wooden in his reaction to these fairly spectacular damsels.” Another reviewer said “Warners’ new star–or what is hoped will be a new star–Paul Newman, shows promise of doing better things in a movie future. Tall, fair, handsome, undeniably suggesting a blond Brando, he is personable but suffers from the picture’s unwieldy cutting and clipped continuity.”

 

 What’s with all the allusions to Brando? I don’t see the resemblance. Newman admitted years later that he was mistaken for the actor so many times when he first came to Hollywood that he signed “Best Wishes, Marlon Brando” hundreds of times in fans’ autograph books so they wouldn’t be disappointed. To his credit, no one despised “The Silver Chalice” more than Paul Newman himself. “That I survived the first film I did was extraordinarily good fortune. I mean, I had dogs chasing me down the street. I was wearing this tiny little Greek cocktail dress–with *my* legs! Good Lord, it was really bad. In fact, it was the worst film made in the 1950s. My first review said that ‘Mr. Newman delivers his lines with the emotional fervor of a Putnam stop conductor announcing local stop.’” When “The Silver Chalice” had its first television showing in 1966, Newman took out a full-page ad in “Variety” begging people not to watch the film.

 

The Desperate Hours

 

 

 

Smarting from being talked into such a stinker, Paul Newman took control of his career and hightailed it back to New York. He accepted the gritty part of an escaped convict terrorizing a family in “The Desperate Hours” on Broadway and was a sensation, playing against the pretty-boy image Warner Bros. was only too keen to exploit. The film version, made in 1955, starred a much older Humphrey Bogart in Newman’s role.

 

 

Newman then starred in a wonderful TV version of “Our Town” directed by Delbert Mann. I once took a class at UCLA in which Delbert Mann screened this poignant version of Thornton Wilder’s story starring Newman as George and the radiant Eva Marie Saint as Emily. Eva Marie, a friend of my wife Kendall’s family, was at the screening, and talked about how much she loved working with Paul Newman, what a pure and generous actor he was.

 

Newman’s triumphant return to Hollywood was as Rocky Graziano in “Somebody Up There Likes Me.” James Dean had been signed for the part but after his tragic death it went to his good friend Paul. Newman’s “Our Town” costar, Eva Marie Saint, was supposed to play Norma, but the part went instead to his “Silver Chalice” wife, Pier Angeli. He got great reviews for the film and he had the chance to reunite with Eva Marie Saint a few years later in Otto Preminger’s “Exodus.” Preminger said that one of the reasons he gave Newman the lead was that he wanted a Jew who didn’t look Jewish. Oy. (In case you’re surprised to read that Newman was Jewish, his father was Jewish and his mother was Catholic but he considered himself Jewish “because it was more of a challenge.”)

 

Newman also starred opposite… Barbara Rush in the somewhat forgotten “The Young Philadelphians” in 1959 and I know that Barbara always had nothing but praise for her costar. This film, in which Newman played an up-and-coming Philadelphia lawyer facing ethical dilemmas as he tried to climb the social ladder, is great fun to watch, as evidenced by this ridiculous trailer…

 

Wow, that’s insane. But check out this understated, sizzling scene between Paul Newman and “Hud” housekeeper Patricia Neal:

 

Have you EVER seen a more sexual scene than that? And without anyone taking their clothes off! How about this painful scene from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?” Remember what a great actress Elizabeth Taylor was?

 

Great career. Great life. Amazing philanthropist. Tireless humanitarian. A class act to the end. Newman was a fierce Democrat. He once said that getting on Nixon’s enemy list was the single greatest honor of his life. After the homosexual aspects of his character in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” were toned down for the movie version by the skittish studio, Newman tried desperately to star in a film version of the novel “The Front Runner,” about the love affair between a male coach and his star runner. He was never able to get it off the ground. “I’m a supporter of gay rights,” he said. “And not a closet supporter either. From the time I was a kid, I have never been able to understand attacks upon the gay community. There are so many qualities that make up a human being…by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it is irrelevant.”

 

 

Newman’s feelings about his good looks were complex. Although regarded today as a brilliant actor, many people earlier in his career believed that his looks were a detriment. Lee Strasberg said that though Newman was as talented as Brando, he wasn’t taken as seriously because he was so handsome. Newman himself once said the one thing he didn’t want his epitaph to say was “Here lies Paul Newman who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.” The first time he remembered women going nuts for him was during the shooting of “Hud” in Texas. “Women were literally trying to climb through the transoms at the motel where I stayed. At first, it’s flattering to the ego. At first. Then you realize that they’re mixing me up with the roles I play–characters created by writers who have nothing to do with who I am.”

 

A few years ago, Newman said, “I’d like to be remembered as a guy who tried–who tried to be part of his times, tried to help people communicate with one another, tried to find some decency in his own life, tried to extend himself as a human being. Someone who wasn’t complacent, who didn’t cop out.”

 

Mission accomplished, Paul.