Now that the biography of this permanent A list mostly movie actor who was an Oscar winner/nominee has been published, it confirms what I told you would be omitted, when first announced.

It had the blessing of the family, and they wanted nothing to disrupt the charitable efforts of the family, so didn’t talk about his numerous same s.e.x. relationships.

Paul Newman

The Last Movie Stars

Review: ‘The Last Movie Stars’ is a ‘moving’ dive into the lives, careers of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward

For more than half a century, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward brought starshine and exceptionalism to the art of acting and sustained their marriage through emotional storms. “The Last Movie Stars” is the title of the knockout, six-part HBO Max series that blows past fan puffery to make you think and feel about what fame does to flesh-and-blood humans.

That the series happened at all is due to Ethan Hawke, the gifted actor and director who took a call from the couple’s youngest daughter, TV producer Clea Newman, asking him to tell the unfiltered story of her parents. It wouldn’t be easy. Newman died of lung cancer at 83 in 2008, and Woodward, now 92, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s the year prior.

The way in would be audio interviews that family pal and screenwriter Stewart Stern (“Rachel, Rachel”) had done with Newman, Woodward and their inner circle in the 1980s and 1990s for a planned memoir — with one caveat.

Thinking better of letting those conversations invade his privacy, Newman had burned the tapes, not knowing that Stern had made transcripts. It’s those printed pages which form the basis for Hawke’s landmark achievement, a meta-biography that we watch come together right before our astonished eyes.

To fill in the details, Hawke called in a couple friends: George Clooney to speak the words of Newman and Laura Linney for Woodward.

We learn the couple’s relationship started in scandal, a torrid affair that began when Newman and Woodward were Broadway understudies in 1953’s “Picnic.” He was married to Jackie Witte and the father of three. Newman experienced a guilt that hung on, even after he and Woodward wed in 1958. – Source

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