Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward: The Secret History of Hollywood’s Most Enviable Marriage

There was a time when Hollywood created a pantheon of celebrity couples, companions on screen and off. The 1940s gave us Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, and Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The 50s brought Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, the protagonists of ‘The Last Movie Stars’, a revealing documentary directed by Ethan Hawke. All six parts of the docuseries are now available on HBO Max.

The romantic legend of Newman and Woodward is irresistible. He was a superstar, a blue-eyed wonder in movies like ‘Hud: Wildest of a Thousand’, ‘Two Men and One Destiny’ and ‘The Legend of the Wild’, one of the most handsome men to ever appear on screen. Woodward, an acclaimed actress’s actress, won an Oscar early in her career for “The Three Faces of Eve,” and continued to work while she raised her three daughters. They were married for 50 years, until her death in 2008. In principle, who would not want to live that life?

But Hawke’s series, affectionately honest, reveals what the old Hollywood publicity machine never did: that they lived an on-and-off romance for five years while he was married to his first wife, that he battled alcoholism so much that she once took the kids and left, that his subsequent affairs were no secret.

Destroying the myth makes Newman and Woodward more real and in tune with today’s world.. “If you make them into story figures, you don’t have to ask yourself challenging questions,” Hawke tells T&C. “You just think, ‘God gave them a lifelong love relationship…they’re lucky,’ instead of saying, ‘Wow, they really worked hard to love each other and they really hurt, and yet they used all of that to keep growing. ‘ That’s what I find really inspiring.” And they lasted more than half a century together. Such a lasting relationship is almost unfathomable for celebrity couples now, when five years seems long and it is, for example, a challenge to keep up with the couples of the Kardashian family.

The Newmans’ youngest daughter, Clea, who went to school with Hawke, came to him with the idea for the documentary and thousands of pages of interviews. By 1986, Newman had begun writing an autobiography and asked his old friend, screenwriter Stewart Stern, to record interviews with him, Woodward, and their friends and colleagues.. Five years later she asked Stern to stop. Newman burned the tapes, but the transcripts survived.

Hawke took the idea in a bold direction that could easily have been static, but turned out to be dynamic.. He assembled an all-star cast to talk to him via Zoom and read voiceover transcripts. George Clooney is the voice of Newman and Laura Linney is the voice of Woodward. Zoe Kazan is Newman’s first wife, Jackie (yes, she spoke!), along with Sam Rockwell, Billy Crudup, Sally Field and others. Their voices are interspersed with those of the real Newman and Woodward, with clippings from on-camera interviews throughout their careers and movie clips.

They were electric in their first film together, ‘The Long Hot Summer’ (1958), and moving in their last, as an aging couple in ‘Waiting for Mr. Bridge’ (1990).. You can see why he became a sex symbol and why she got another Oscar nomination as repressed school teacher in Rachel, Rachel (1968), which Newman directed. Hawke also speaks with four of Newman’s five daughters, including Stephanie, the youngest of his three children from her first marriage.

The revelations are sometimes raw. As their romance began, Paul says: “We leave a trail of lust everywhere, hotels, motels, public parks and bathrooms”, which Clooney delivers with a tongue-in-cheek twist. Joanne says: “From the first time I met Paul, I always knew he was a drunk”a phrase that Linney pronounces with total naturalness.

Casting the elegant Woodward was easy, Hawke recalls. She was one of Linney’s great personal mentors. Woodward is now 92 years old and, as noted in the documentary, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2007.. And very few people have the stardom that Newman lived and that Clooney has. For that reason, says Hawke, “I thought Clooney might have a vision of what Paul was talking about. And I think it was important, especially for young people, to understand how famous Paul Newman was, so I needed to evoke that iconic status.” .

Newman’s career always overshadowed Woodward’s. “Joanne certainly didn’t want to be just Paul Newman’s wife,” says Hawke. “It would be dishonest to think that the kind of hero worship that surrounded her husband wasn’t hard to live with.”. In the series, Melissa Newman says of her parents’ stripped-down, fairy-tale version, “To some extent I feel guilty about taking that story apart because everyone needs those kinds of heroes, but at the same time I think they deserve more credit.” than that”.

That myth was the creation of a different media age, of course. One of the episodes features typical magazine headlines like “The Newmans: How to Stay Married Despite Success”. A gossip article from the 1970s suggests a break, saying: “Rumors about the Newman marriage are building to a quiet roar.” But those whispers never roared. Was it because the press was less intrusive and there were no social networks? Or is it that the press did not investigate further because no one really wanted to break the fairy tale? It is likely that all these reasons have influenced.

The documentary’s title comes from an interview with Gore Vidal, in which he speculated that since television was overtaking movies, his great friends the Newmans might be the last movie stars. A good argument, but more than 30 years later, really? Clooney is there.

However, with the usual divorces and social media all over the place, theirs could be the last Hollywood marriage idealized in that “happily ever after” way. Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson or Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn may be among the most stable couples in Hollywood today, with Emily Blunt and John Krasinski on the way for a younger generation, but such examples are becoming rarer. Newman and Woodward may well be the ultimate movie star couple, seen in a new light that allows us to admire the deep, flawed love and truth of their precious romance of more than 50 years.