5 Things You Didn’t Know About Paul Newman

Few names come with as much groundbreaking Hollywood history attached as Paul Newman. Born 100 years ago on January 26, 2025, in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Newman conquered the silver screen in the ’60s and ’70s, turning in performances that were often iconic — and sometimes, so powerful, they changed popular culture (would we have our current boom of charming anti-heroes without Newman’s Butch Cassidy or Cool Hand Luke?).
But Newman was always modest about his talent and success. As he wrote of his professional beginnings in his posthumously published 2022 memoir, “It was my appearance that got me in the door. Where the hell would I have been if I looked like Golda Meir?”
Though he passed in 2008 after a battle with lung cancer, Newman’s influence is still with us. So celebrate his centenary with five things you probably didn’t know about the blue-eyed legend.
1He refused to change his last name

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Newman was half-Jewish on his father’s side, and experienced painful anti-semitism growing up. “if you were Jewish, some avenues were shut to you,” he wrote in his memoir, which “hurt me and my brother a great deal.” Once he began acting, it was suggested that he change his last name to something less ethnic (as his many of his peers had done — like Kirk Douglas, who had been born Issur Danielovitch). But Newman insisted on keeping his birth name: “It seemed more of a challenge to me to keep my real name, to insist upon it as a badge.”
2He met Joanne Woodward at his first major professional acting gig
![1957: JOANNE WOODWARD [Best Actress, 3 FACES OF EVE] dances with husband PAUL NEWMAN at post-Oscar party, 3/26/58](https://www.remindmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/paul-newman-joanne-woodward-464x720.jpg)
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Newman was married at the time to his first wife, Jackie Witte, whom he had tied the knot with in 1949; they officially divorced in 1958. In his memoir, he says that he regretted how he acted during his divorce from Witte, and particularly, how he explained the divorce to their children: “What I did just didn’t have any class. I didn’t take them aside and give them comfort by explanation, certainly not in a way that they would understand.”
Woodward and Newman married in 1958, and had one of the longest-running marriages in Hollywood; they collaborated frequently, and were together until Newman’s death in 2008. Newman wrote in his memoir that “girls thought I was a joke” before he met Woodward, who helped him see himself in a new light, giving him the confidence to become one of the great sex symbols of classic Hollywood.
3His first movie was a Bible epic (that he later begged people not to see)
Unlike some of peers who also studied at the Actors Studio, like Marlon Brando and James Dean, Newman didn’t get to start making great films right away. He made his debut in the 1954 Bible epic The Silver Chalice, a film which Variety called “sometimes tedious” in a contemporaneous review. Newman himself called it “the worst motion picture produced during the 1950s,” and supposedly, Dean mocked Newman to his face for appearing in it.
His breakthrough in 1956’s Somebody Up There Likes Me was only two years away (and, ironically, Newman nabbed the role after Dean, who had planned to star in the film, died), but Newman never stopped feeling shame over the film. In 1963, long after he became one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, he took out a newspaper ad begging people to skip a TV airing of The Silver Chalice, which read “Paul Newman apologizes every night this week—Channel 9.” The ad backfired, and viewer numbers were huge — turns out, people were desperate to know what was in this movie that made Paul Newman so upset.
4He didn’t win an Academy Award until 1986

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Newman is often remembered as a peer to Brando. However, Brando won his first Best Actor Oscar in 1955, for On the Waterfront … so why did it take Newman until the ’80s to take home a trophy himself? Newman was first nominated for Best Actor in 1959 for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof but lost … a process that would occur five more time before Newman finally won for The Color of Money in 1987.
The previous year, in 1986, he had been awarded an Academy Honorary Award for “many memorable and compelling screen performances” — an honor more typically given to actors at the end of their careers. Though Newman was 61 at the time, he was obviously not winding down his career — he said in his acceptance speech that he hoped “that my best work is down the pike in front of me.”
Why did the win take so long? It’s tough to say; even Leonardo DiCaprio only had to wait 22 years from his first Oscar nomination to his first win. And we’ll never know exactly what Newman felt about it — he couldn’t be there to accept the award, so director Robert Wise accepted in his place.
Wise didn’t even get to say whatever speech he had prepared — after beginning “Paul wanted everybody to know that after coming here for seven other occasions like this …” Bette Davis cut him off, giving her own tribute to Newman and Wise. Music then began playing them both off stage.
5He literally gave more to charity than anyone else
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Newman was almost as famous for his philanthropy as he was for his acting. In 1982, he founded Newman’s Own, a line of foods and drinks that donated all post-tax profits to charity. In 1988, he founded the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, a summer camp for seriously ill children that now has locations worldwide. He also founded the SeriousFun Children’s Network of camps for sick children, created an organization to protect clean water, gave $10 million to his alma mater Kenyon College, and in 2011, his estate gifted land to the town of Westport, Connecticut, the town that Newman and Woodward called him.
When Newman passed in 2008, The Economist said that he was “the most generous individual, relative to his income, in the 20th-century history of the United States.”

1968 Retrospective
January 2018
This special expanded issue celebrates all things pop culture in 1968.
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