(Credits: Far Out / Public Domain / TCM)
Fri 26 September 2025 20:15, UK
The age-old adage that an actor is only as good as their last role is quite clearly bullshit when Paul Newman, one of America’s greatest-ever performers and a legend of cinema, bowed out by voicing a sentient automobile in Pixar’s Cars.
One of his generation’s, and the entire ‘New Hollywood’ era’s, biggest stars, Newman toed the line between being an acclaimed thespian and a bankable leading man, even if the latter caused him plenty of consternation when his piercing blue eyes and handsome face became his defining characteristics.
The easiest way to show the world that you’re more than just a pretty face is to act the hell out of every part that comes your way, and it’s an understatement to say that he did it with aplomb. A ten-time Academy Award nominee and one-time winner, ironically, the year after he was awarded an honorary gong, Newman bid farewell to live-action cinema with Sam Mendes’ 2002 crime thriller, Road to Perdition.
Stepping into the recording booth and bringing Doc Hudson to life in the animated juggernaut’s first genuinely mediocre film tied a forgettable bow around one of the industry’s most celebrated and decorated careers, but Newman still found the time to reveal he had one more award-winning performance left in him.
Three years after Road to Perdition, and a year before Cars, he played Max Roby in the HBO miniseries Empire Falls, which aired across two consecutive nights in May 2005. It would be the last time he ever appeared in front of the cameras as an actor, and even at 80 years old, he proved he hadn’t lost a step.
For his turn as the scruffy, curmudgeonly patriarch of the central family, Newman won the Primetime Emmy and Golden Globe for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ in a miniseries or made-for-TV movie, which vindicated his decision to avoid turning Empire Falls into a feature in favour of giving the story the time to breathe across two nights of television.
As an executive producer and all-around icon, he had the clout to bring Richard Russo’s “extraordinary book” to the small screen. “I know there was a lot of interest in making like a two-hour film out of it, and I thought that would truncate all the values in it,” he told Fosters Daily Democrat. “It had to be done in a longer format. No major studio wants to make a three-hour, three-and-a-half-hour film.”
Since his character was a bit of a vagrant and a vagabond, not to mention an occasional thief and a cantankerous old coot, Newman grew out a straggly beard, which didn’t sit well with his wife, Joanne Woodward. As soon as he’d finished shooting his scenes, she demanded it disappear from his face.
“Joanne made me shave the homeless part off first,” he shared. “Then she got the rest of it; I should really say, while I was sleeping. She was not enamoured with it.”
Woodward may not have been a fan of his facial furniture, but as a student of the method, he needed it to get into character, and his award-winning performance did at least justify his decision to sport the stringy fuzz in Empire Falls.
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