Ron Shelton, who directed Mr. Newman in Blaze, said yesterday that as one of the enduring movie stars, "You can put him up on Mount Rushmore, next to Gable, Grant and Bogart." As both an actor and an American movie personality he was unique. He came up as a Method actor and persisted in chewing over his roles endlessly - "he loved the process of discovery," Mr. Shelton said.
But as his career went on, he eschewed halting, scratching Method mannerisms for an inspired, even lyrical straightforwardness. His discussions centered on mining the possibilities of characters as stringent as Hud or as buoyant as Butch Cassidy, not just on how they related to him personally.
Veteran writer-director Robert Towne hit a similar note yesterday, saying, "He had an utter lack of narcissism. He was never comfortable as part of that generation of brilliantly self-absorbed actors. He was kind of old-fashioned, very direct."
He minted as many iconic images as any old-time star. Mr. Newman scooting down a city street with his hands in his pockets and his hair tousled was a classic image of what-the-hell urban bravado. Mr. Newman savoring a beer in cowboy duds became the epitome of a wised-up rural "show me" attitude.
No other performer was simultaneously as handsome and as talented as Mr. Newman. Mr. Towne remembered seeing Mr. Newman for the first time at a Hollywood tennis party in the 1950s: "He was so ridiculously good-looking that it was hard to take your eyes off him."
That makes it all the more remarkable that he was equally popular with women and with men who often disdain "pretty boys." Mr. Newman's soul-piercing blue eyes became his signature feature; the whole package made him a movie deity. It was no accident that Hollywood first put him into a disastrous Biblical movie called The Silver Chalice, as a Greek artisan who designs the chalice that holds the cup from the Last Supper.
Mr. Newman had the classical profile and even the tight, curly hair of a Greco-Roman god. Yet as director Marc Abraham (Flash of Genius), recently told The Baltimore Sun, men who took their dates to a Newman movie thought, "I'm so far from that guy, I'm not going to worry about that."
He also had an all-encompassing democratic rapport that crossed social boundaries. He was "more comfortable with his long- necked Budweiser hanging out with the Teamsters than he was with the publicists," Shelton said. "You can't fake that, you know."
