Paul Newman Winding Down Acting Career
LONDON – Paul Newman, the movie legend whose piercing blue eyes have lit up screens for five decades, says he’ll give up the activities he once described as his two great passions ó acting and motor racing.
“I think both are winding down,” Newman told The Associated Press during an interview Friday. “I’ll probably race for another year.”
Fans need not despair just yet. The iconic star of “The Hustler” and “Cool Hand Luke” says he plans to make one last film ó “for good luck.”
He won’t say what it is, but hints that a long-rumored reunion with Robert Redford, his co-star in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “The Sting,” may yet happen.
“I hate to talk about anything until the papers are drawn up, but we’ve been looking for something for 20 years and now we’re looking harder,” Newman said. “I hope something will come of it.”
Newman, whose film career began in 1954 with “The Silver Chalice” ó a costume drama he quickly disowned ó has been a motorsports fan since he starred in the 1969 racing film “Winning” and still competes regularly. In January he escaped injury when the car he was testing caught fire following a spin at Daytona International Speedway.
But he plans to give up the thrill of the track to spend more time with his wife of 47 years, Joanne Woodward.
“Joanne is the artistic director of the Westport Country Playhouse (a theater near the couple’s Connecticut home) and her duties will stop this year,” Newman said. “If my racing stops, the two of us will be together, spend some time just horsing around.”
In London to promote a deal between his Newman’s Own range of salad dressings and fast-food giant McDonald’s, Newman sat Friday in a McDonald’s branch on London’s busy Oxford Street, surrounded by fast-food executives and a British TV crew.
The actor, who turned 80 in January, moves a little stiffly and strains to hear occasionally. But his clear skin and sparkling eyes are as vivid as ever, and his passion for his business and his charitable work is undimmed.
Newman’s salad dressings, pasta sauces and popcorn have raised $175 million for charity since he and friend A.E. Hotchner started the company as a lark in 1980, offering Newman’s homemade dressing for sale in a few shops near his Westport, Conn., home.
The company now produces dozens of products. Newman says he still tastes every batch of their products, and all profits go to charity.
The company has supplied McDonald’s restaurants in the United States with salad dressing since 2003; a range of low-fat Newman’s Own dressings will be available in British, Irish and Danish branches of the chain starting in June.
Regularly voted among the greatest movie stars of all time ó he ranked No. 1 in a 2001 British survey of screen legends ó Newman has been nominated nine times for acting Oscars, and won the best actor prize in 1986 for “The Color of Money.”
But he says he’s proudest of his charity work, especially the summer camps for seriously ill children in the United States, Britain, Ireland Israel, France and southern Africa.
Categories