Paul Newman: 10 essential films

In his posthumously published 2022 memoir, Paul Newman describes his movie stardom almost as something he fell into. Claiming he “never enjoyed acting”, with the appeal of Hollywood partly being the route it offered him out of smalltown Ohio, Newman thought also that success came to him because of his looks rather than talent, stating: “It was my appearance that got me in the door… it was like being a guy with a trust fund who doesn’t have to work.”

Newman, however, studied acting at the Actors Studio and Yale and put in some hard yards in the theatre before he was suddenly, in the mid-1950s, vaulted into lead roles in movies. And if on screen he was often cool, not unlike his box office rival Steve McQueen, Newman was also frequently insecure and unheroic, playing screw-ups, con artists, big drinkers – not necessarily typical movie star roles – with a determination that he kept up all through his career. The looks may have helped him break into movies, but it was Newman’s skill at making root-worthy human beings of antiheroes that brought him acting Oscar nominations (nine, in total) across five different decades. It kept his name at the top of the bill until his very last film.

Director: Richard Brooks

After his debut as a romantic hero in toga epic The Silver Chalice (1954) proved a busted flush, Newman was presented to audiences anew as a representative of the Method school of acting. Following a committed performance as a combustible pugilist in Somebody up There Likes Me (1956), Newman was cast as sulky, sensitive outsiders in the vein of Montgomery Clift and James Dean, soon resulting in his first Oscar nomination, for 1958’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Richard Brooks’ Tennessee Williams adaptation smoothes off the rougher edges of the source text, but the spirit of the play is carried over in Newman, all magnetic and mean as the self-hating, likely-closeted former star high-school-athlete self-anaesthetising with booze.

Director: Robert Rossen

To earn his second Oscar nomination, Newman displayed a full spectrum of his dramatic ability. As pool shark ‘Fast’ Eddie Felson, in The Hustler Newman is bright-eyed and eager when luring any potential suckers into playing against him, obnoxious when he wins and pitiful in his desperation when he begins to lose; smouldering when seducing his barfly love interest, Sarah (Piper Laurie), and ice-cold when he tires of her. Felson is a many-dimensioned challenge of a lead role from director Robert Rossen and his co-screenwriter Sidney Carroll, deftly handled by Newman in what is an electric mix of barroom sports drama and intelligent character study.

Director: Martin Ritt

The fourth of six films that Newman made with his former Actors Studio teacher Martin Ritt, Hud feels for the very limit of what an audience might deem permissible in a character with Newman in the role. With swaggering self-possession, Newman plays the hard-living, womanising Hud Bannon, whose principled rancher father (Melvyn Douglas) he seeks to usurp and whose impressionable nephew (Brandon deWilde) he aims to turn as morally corrupt as he is. Newman’s beauty and charm by this time were nuclear-grade, his character immersion as deep as ever – he worked on a real Texas ranch prior to shooting the film – so that even Hud’s denim-clad devil elicits some sympathy come the film’s end.

Director: Stuart Rosenberg

By the mid-1960s, Newman had eased into a star persona, with his characters tending to be the emotionally withholding anti-establishment types that Newman could play so naturally. Both a quintessential example of that type and not, Cool Hand Luke’s Florida con Lucas Jackson spends the first half of the film casually undermining authority through antics with his fellow prison inmates, and the second half in an increasing state of melancholy. Some of Newman’s most moving work is here, with Luke in one scene tearfully singing a tender rendition of folk ditty Plastic Jesus, in another arguing with God for having made him the way he is: a born nonconformist despondent that the world doesn’t seem to have a place for someone like him.

Director: George Roy Hill

With Robert Redford cast as laconic gunslinger Sundance – the role that Newman would have preferred to play – it falls to Newman to deliver most of the gag lines in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, as Sundance’s loquacious partner-in-crime Butch. A buddy movie set in the dying days of the lawless West, Butch and Sundance has a crucially well-matched central pairing, with Newman and Redford together conjuring that ineffable cinematic magic known as on-screen chemistry. But Newman’s throwaway ease with one-liners might be the film’s great revelation, the actor working in a comic mode so successfully that director George Roy Hill would place Newman at the centre of his own fully-fledged comedy, the riotously profane Slap Shot, eight years later.

Director: George Roy Hill

One of the blockbuster box office hits of the New Hollywood period and as supreme a work of entertainment as any in the filmographies of Newman, Redford or Hill, The Sting proved a fruitful reunion for team Butch and Sundance. This Depression-era heist flick is more Redford’s show than it is Newman’s, with the latter playing a veteran con man who helps Redford’s hotshot grifter fleece a vicious crime boss (Robert Shaw) through a series of satisfyingly unfolding charades and double-crosses. Still, Newman is as effortlessly charismatic as he would ever be in the role, dazzlingly charming as a character who’s required to wrongfoot his adversaries and the audience both.

Director: Robert Altman

In Robert Altman’s revisionist western about the mythmaking Wild West shows of William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, Newman is the star around which the rest of the Altman ensemble orbits. In 1885, Cody (Newman) manages a kind of personal fiefdom of performers, all dedicated to telling a paying audience Cody’s account of the taming of the Old West. But Cody is just another of Newman’s con men – the famous long hair actually a wig, his marksman’s pistols secretly loaded with buckshot, his whole carnival act built on tall tales of white heroism and native savagery – and the actor never appeared more buffoonish than he does dismantling that American icon.

Director: Sidney Lumet

Speaking on Newman’s work in Sidney Lumet’s sober legal drama The Verdict, Robert Altman praised Newman’s willingness to “[show] you his pink places” in his performances. The Verdict’s Frank Galvin, a funeral-crashing lawyer who musters the energy to fight one last case righteously despite long odds, could be the role for which Newman left himself most exposed. It’s the performance of Newman’s which involves the least apparent acting, the star aura dimmed for a portrait of a cynical, alcoholic middle-aged man in his everydayness, with the most extraordinary thing about the character being his sudden decision to do the right thing.

Director: Martin Scorsese

Returning to the role of Fast Eddie Felson 25 years after The Hustler, Newman plays the part of the bankrolling mentor in The Color of Money – at least initially. While touring America’s fading billiard halls as manager of Tom Cruise’s cocky young pool artist, Felson – now greying, lined, raspy of voice – picks up a cue and starts to play competitively again. A year after Newman was given the Academy’s Honorary Award, typically a lifetime achievement trophy for artists in the twilight of their careers, Martin Scorsese’s dynamic legacyquel finally got Newman a Best Actor Oscar on his seventh nomination. It was a defiant win for an actor playing an older man rediscovering his fire, the character’s closing line an emphatic “I’m back!”

Director: Sam Mendes

Newman’s last on-screen film role – he’d later voice an over-the-hill race car in Pixar’s Cars (2006), before his death in 2008 – had the actor once more finding his character in a delicate space between straightforward heroism and villainy. A warm, grandfatherly figure with a voice that’s little more than a whisper, Road to Perdition’s John Rooney is also the Mob boss who orders the murder of the film’s hero, Tom Hanks’s enforcer Michael, for whom Rooney has been not just an employer but a surrogate father. Where once Newman could be unflappably cool, in Sam Mendes’ Prohibition-era revenge drama the actor’s every line quivers with feeling, Newman in his ultimate appearance in the cinema summoning a gentle final surge of emotion.