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blue bits. red rocks.
Sunday 28 September 2008

Newman has to have been one of the most famous movie stars for whom there is no automatically recognizable caricature version; he gave nightclub impressions few outsized mannerisms to latch onto. Newman was someone who moviegoers probably felt they knew better from his offscreen image than from any carefully maintained screen image. His image was that of a superior being who laughed at the idea that he was anything but a regular guy who’d been very, very lucky; a supreme sex symbol who, if given the chance, would probably bore you blind telling you how crazy he was about his wife of fifty years, Joanne Woodward, and his family life (“”I have steak at home,” Newman once famously told a Playboy interviewer who had the balls to ask him what he had on the side, “why go out for hamburger?”); a celebrity liberal who put his money where his mouth was and became a leading philanthropist, plowing hundred of millions of dollars into charitable causes, much of it generated by Newman’s Own, the fantastically profitable food line that Newman and writer A. E. Hotchner began in 1982 as a joke. Paul Newman, 1925—2008

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