Do we like Paul Newman?
Our score: 9 out of 10. Decades of giving away the profits and backing civil rights and peace, with no harmful words or company turning up in the reporting.
Newman grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the second of two boys. He served in the Navy after World War II, studied English at Kenyon College, then went to Yale's drama school and on to New York. His Actors Studio classmates included Brando, James Dean and Karl Malden.
The screen career speaks for itself: Hud, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Verdict. He earned ten Oscar nominations and won the competitive one for The Color of Money, plus an honorary Oscar in 1986. He also directed Rachel, Rachel, and raced professionally, finishing second at Le Mans in 1979.
A posthumous memoir, drawn from recorded conversations, shows a man less sure of himself than the poster boy. He said he “never enjoyed acting”, and described a distant father and a difficult upbringing. He admitted he gave up hard liquor after his marriage came close to ending, which is honest stuff from a bloke who could have kept the myth polished.
The harm check comes up clean. He was an early anti-Vietnam War activist and campaigned for Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972. The Nation reports he stayed dedicated to civil rights, women's rights and gay rights, and he backed Ralph Nader and Barack Obama. We found no harmful words, and no nasty company, in the reporting.
Nixon's aide Charles Colson put him on the original White House enemies list in 1971, and Newman called that the “highest single honor I've ever received.” He later made a video for Senate Democrats saying he was “proud to stand with fellow Democrats”. That's a man happy to cop heat for his views, and it's a record of what he did, not a party-card test.
Obituaries describe him as intensely private, with a soft spot for underdogs, someone who shunned Hollywood life and usually declined to sign autographs. Nothing recent has turned up on him, as he died in 2008, and no court record against him surfaced in our searches. The only legal fuss we found was a 2022 suit about his foundation, not about him.