(Credits: Far Out / TCM)
Thu 18 December 2025 19:45, UK
Despite rising to the top of Hollywood through a combination of good looks, natural charm, screen presence, and acting ability, Paul Newman considered himself a lucky man more than anything else.
He once put the success of his decades-long, awards-laden, widely acclaimed, and impressively consistent career down to ‘Newman’s Luck’, a self-coined series of events that saw him emerge as a theatre performer in the late 1940s, who’d established himself as a Hollywood A-lister by the mid-1960s.
While there’s an air of self-deprecation about it, he wasn’t inaccurate. As grim as it sounds, few actors, if any, in the business benefited more from James Dean’s death than Newman. They were casual acquaintances, peers, and professional rivals who often competed for the same parts, and the Rebel Without a Cause star’s tragic demise opened the door for the latter to catch his big break.
Newman was upgraded to the lead in a live production of Ernest Hemingway’s The Battler after Dean’s death vacated the part, and the late icon was also the first choice to play Rocky Graziano in Robert Wise’s Somebody Up There Likes Me, an instrumental film for Newman that gave him his first major lead in a feature, and helped wash away the sour taste of The Silver Chalice.
That’s not to say he wouldn’t have ended up where he did if Dean had lived, but it was a fortunate event in the most unfortunate circumstances. Another up-and-comer in the ’50s who frequently found themselves going head-to-head with the Giant headliner in casting calls and on studio wish lists was Marlon Brando, who quickly established himself at the head of the performative pack.
Nobody inside or outside of the industry had ever seen anything like him before, and as a method actor by trade who’d also trained under Lee Strasberg, possessed a ruggedly handsome visage, favoured a more natural approach to their craft, it was inevitable that Brando and Newman would be lumped into the same conversation, especially when they were less than a year apart in age.
They were two very different talents, though, and as much as the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting star bristled at the comparisons, he knew that not only was he his own kind of actor, he didn’t have the same natural, unfiltered, and almost animalistic sense of barely-contained rage that Brando did.
Reflecting on the Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront figurehead’s strengths, Newman knew it was an area in which he couldn’t compete. “It’s his ability to burn like a volcano that is about to explode,” he told Oriana Fallaci. “It’s being Brando and only Brando, which is to say the best actor that we have in the US, and to remain Brando.”
“I’m not always myself,” Newman continued. “If I play a cowboy, I’m a cowboy. If I play a surgeon, I’m a surgeon. And if I play a gigolo, I’m a gigolo. When people watch Brando instead, they watch Brando playing the cowboy, the surgeon, the gigolo. As for our physical resemblance: there’s nothing I can do about it. I can just let my beard grow.”
He did let his beard grow once, and his wife, Joanne Woodward, fucking hated it.
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