Paul Newman was many things: actor, director, race car driver, philanthropist and much more, but I’ll always remember him as the actor who got screwed out of a Best Actor Oscar too many times:
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) - lost to David Niven, Separate Tables
The Hustler (1961) - lost to Maximilian Schell, Judgment at Nuremberg
Hud (1963) - lost to Sidney Poitier, Lilies of the Field
Cool Hand Luke (1967) - lost to Rod Steiger, In the Heat of the Night
Absence of Malice (1981) - lost to Henry Fonda, On Golden Pond
The Verdict (1982) - lost to Ben Kingsley, Gandhi
The Color of Money (1986) - won
Nobody’s Fool (1994) - lost to Tom Hanks, Forrest Gump
The loss I remember most was the one to Ben Kingsley. Don’t get me wrong, Kingsley is a fine actor but I remember thinking at the time that he was literally born to play that part. Newman made Frank Galvin come alive as a drunk, ambulance-chasing lawyer that’s had the case of his life dumped in his lap, a case that can set him for life as long as he doesn’t screw it up. Newman never overplays the role, but you can look at him onscreen and rest assured that most of what he’s doing isn’t in the script. It’s a mostly quiet performance, but a virtuoso one.
Some of the other losses were just bad timing. At the 1982 Oscars, Henry Fonda was literally on his deathbed. There was no way in the universe that Fonda wasn’t going to win. Newman would’ve had to give birth on camera to beat him and I’m not even sure that would’ve helped.
Hud and Cool Hand Luke both contain excellent Newman performances, but again, the time wasn’t right for him, not like it was for Poitier and Steiger, for many reasons. But Newman should have won for The Hustler. I challenge anyone to look at Newman’s performance in that film, then look at Schell in Judgment at Nuremberg and tell me who’s left standing. But Nuremberg was a highly emotional film released at the right time.
By the time Newman finally won a Best Actor Oscar for 1986’s The Color of Money, you could tell he didn’t really care. But Katherine Hepburn once said you never get the Oscar for the film you deserved it for. I think she’s right, but what I always remembered was that Newman just didn’t seem to give a rip about it. He just kept doing what he was good at, taking the roles he wanted, giving them his all. The body of work we’re left with is what counts.
2 comments:
Great post. It helped Kingsley that his movie was a sprawling, costume-laden affair, and we know (Titanic) how Hollywood (Gladiator) loves itself (The Sound of Music) some big (Gone With The Wind) production values (Amadeus).
Very true. Put on a bunch of costumes, go to some exotic location (deserts are always good - Lawrence of Arabia, The English Patient, etc.), stick Richard Attenborough behind the camera and let him deliver a 3-hour paean, and you've got yourself a multi-Oscar film. And Kingsley has actually done better work since then, many times. But I guess nobody ever said the Oscars were fair.
Post a Comment