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Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward at home, 1958
10.18.2013
11:04 am
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On December 26th, 1958, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were interviewed at home, in their Greenwich Village duplex apartment. The couple had just moved from California the week prior, and their new dwelling was still filled with unpacked belongings when veteran TV broadcaster Edward R. Murrow came visiting via a video-link-up.

Woodward and Newman were nearly a year married, and Joanne was pregnant with the couple’s first child, Nell. Newman joked that an original painting of George Bernard Shaw will hang over the baby’s crib “as we believe in osmosis.”

Joanne had recently won an Oscar for her performance in The Three Faces of Eve, while Newman had picked up the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival and was in the running for an Oscar for his performance in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (The award went to David Niven for Separate Tables.) Woodward describes her Academy Award as “her favorite child, until I have this one.” Her next favorite child is Newman’s “Noscar”, which was presented to the actor upon not being nominated for an Oscar in 1957. Newman would be nominated five times as Best Actor before eventually winning his Oscar for The Color of Money in 1986.

When asked about his “rebel” status, Newman put his head in his hands, then remarked it was “A sore point”:

“We live, in what I call, an age of conformity, where you have to travel with the herd, and if you don’t travel with the herd, and you don’t say ‘Yes’ to that little man that’s leading the pack, why you are branded as a ‘rebel.’ I am trying desperately, I hope, to be an individual. I think there’s quite a bit of difference.”

It’s all harmless and innocent enough, but in the great scheme of things, this kind of TV access, eventually (and dishearteningly) led to Keeping Up With the Kardashians—o, how far we’ve fallen.
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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10.18.2013
11:04 am
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