Fast Eddie (played by Paul Newman): “Fat man, you shoot a great game of pool."
Minnesota Fats (played by Jackie Gleason): “So do you, Fast Eddie.”
--From The Hustler (1961), written by Sidney Carroll and Robert Rossen, directed by Robert Rossen
(Rumors that he was seriously ill and photos demonstrating it had been circulating for awhile. Still, when the news came that Paul Newman had died, I felt the same way I had when hearing that his contemporary Jack Lemmon had passed away several years ago—disbelief that an actor who had been part of my moviegoing life would no longer be around.
He had been acting on stage, TV and film for several years by the time The Hustler came along—and, if you’d like an idea of what he was like then in the early-to-mid-1950s, you might want to go to the Paley Center for Media to see his performance as pitcher Henry Wiggens in the 1956 “U.S. Steel Hour” adaptation of the Mark Harris baseball novel Bang the Drum Slowly.
He earned his first Academy Award nomination for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1958. But for me, the role that would begin to define his legacy in a serious way was the morally compromised antihero “Fast Eddie” Felsen in The Hustler. A quarter of a century later, he would reprise the role in the sequel The Color of Money, finally earning the Oscar he should have won a long time before.
A few other points about Newman:
* When it came time to adapt the Ross Macdonald mystery novel The Moving Target, Newman had come to believe after The Hustler and his next Oscar-nominated movie, Hud, that the later “H” was his lucky letter, so he requested that his private eye be renamed Harper. The subsequent 1966 film was released under that name.
* Nothing like a loving husband to help his wife to a great role: Newman directed and produced a great vehicle for spouse Joanne Woodward—one that netted her an Oscar nomination—in Rachel, Rachel.
* His “Newman’s Own” line of salad dressings, launched with the help of Ernest Hemingway biographer A.E. Hotchner, earned approximately $200 million in profits, with the proceeds going to charities, including the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp that the two men created for seriously ill children in 1988.
* The man whose blue eyes led women swoon for 50 years was color blind.)
--From The Hustler (1961), written by Sidney Carroll and Robert Rossen, directed by Robert Rossen
(Rumors that he was seriously ill and photos demonstrating it had been circulating for awhile. Still, when the news came that Paul Newman had died, I felt the same way I had when hearing that his contemporary Jack Lemmon had passed away several years ago—disbelief that an actor who had been part of my moviegoing life would no longer be around.
He had been acting on stage, TV and film for several years by the time The Hustler came along—and, if you’d like an idea of what he was like then in the early-to-mid-1950s, you might want to go to the Paley Center for Media to see his performance as pitcher Henry Wiggens in the 1956 “U.S. Steel Hour” adaptation of the Mark Harris baseball novel Bang the Drum Slowly.
He earned his first Academy Award nomination for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1958. But for me, the role that would begin to define his legacy in a serious way was the morally compromised antihero “Fast Eddie” Felsen in The Hustler. A quarter of a century later, he would reprise the role in the sequel The Color of Money, finally earning the Oscar he should have won a long time before.
A few other points about Newman:
* When it came time to adapt the Ross Macdonald mystery novel The Moving Target, Newman had come to believe after The Hustler and his next Oscar-nominated movie, Hud, that the later “H” was his lucky letter, so he requested that his private eye be renamed Harper. The subsequent 1966 film was released under that name.
* Nothing like a loving husband to help his wife to a great role: Newman directed and produced a great vehicle for spouse Joanne Woodward—one that netted her an Oscar nomination—in Rachel, Rachel.
* His “Newman’s Own” line of salad dressings, launched with the help of Ernest Hemingway biographer A.E. Hotchner, earned approximately $200 million in profits, with the proceeds going to charities, including the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp that the two men created for seriously ill children in 1988.
* The man whose blue eyes led women swoon for 50 years was color blind.)
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