Key Points
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Sally Field says her Absence of Malice costar Paul Newman complained about not being offered roles.
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“Always talked about being dissatisfied with it,” she revealed in a new interview.
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Field also said he “refused” to accept he was a sex symbol: “It just didn’t occur to him.”
Paul Newman was one of Hollywood’s most decorated movie stars, with an Oscar, an Emmy, and multiple Golden Globes awards. But despite being a living legend, filmmakers weren’t exactly banging on his door.
Sally Field, his costar in the 1981 thriller Absence of Malice, recalled Newman having “a shyness about him,” especially when it came to his impressive filmography.
“He didn’t talk about his previous work very much,” the actress told Criterion in a new interview. “Always talked about being dissatisfied with it… He’d always grumble about there was just- nobody ever offered him any roles. [There] was just no roles for him. And I was going, ‘What?'”
Newman’s first four acting Oscar noms were for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, Hud, and Cool Hand Luke, and he would earn his fifth for Absence of Malice. Cool Hand Luke is best remembered for an iconic scene that Field just had to bring up to Newman on set. “Maybe I asked him about how did he eat all those hardboiled eggs,” she mused to Criterion, although she didn’t share his answer.
When they filmed Sydney Pollock’s Absence of Malice, Newman was three decades into his Hollywood career and considered a sex symbol by movie-goers. But he certainly didn’t act, or think, like it.
“I remember once we shot in Miami at the Miami Herald,” said Field. “There was a shot being set up and we were going to enter the shot or come down the stairs or some such a deal, and I was standing there with Paul and he looked over and he said, ‘Oh my gosh, what’s going on over there? There’s a big crowd.’ And I said, ‘Paul Newman is here. Haven’t you heard?'”
She continued, “It just didn’t occur to him. He just refused to have that in his head.”
The dramatic actor, however, may have been somewhat delusional about one thing: his sense of humor.
“There was a grumpiness to Paul that was kind of wonderful because he was funny within it,” revealed Field. “Paul would always come in and he would stop everything to tell four of the worst jokes you ever heard… and they were elaborate long jokes. But if he wasn’t telling those jokes, he really was funny.”
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Field also worked with Newman’s wife of 50 years, Joanne Woodward, on the 1976 TV miniseries Sybil. And in the 2022 documentary, The Last Movie Stars, she credited the politically active Democratic couple with her own awakening.
“I learned from them,” she said. “Paul taught me. Joanne. I grew up in a very, very conservative household. I watched how they cared about people. Joanne would get so upset when the craft services would serve the crew junk food. She said, ‘You can’t do that. These young men need real food!’ She would make goodies and bring them healthy muffins and nuts and fruits.”
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
