Earlier today I wrote a brief appreciation of the great actor, which you can find here. I am also now regretting that I did not get any deeper into my "Rethinking Paul Newman" posts about his movies, but time and other projects intervened. And, frankly, I was hoping that he would be around longer. Anyway, one of the posts, about "Nobody's Fool," talks about the way Newman got better as an actor as he grew older. (You can find it here.) And of the many marvels that were Newman's career, that's a big one. He never rested on his laurels or bogged down in eccentricity. If his resume includes the occasional role that appears to be for the paycheck ("The Towering Inferno" comes to mind), they were rarities in a career that included repeated searches for challenging parts. "The Color of Money" has its merits, but look closely at "Nobody's Fool" and "The Verdict" and "Road to Perdition" and other parts that showed a man racing for glory instead of just riding into the sunset.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 27th, 2008 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Paul Newman, Rethinking Paul Newman. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.