A character actor trapped in a movie star’s charisma, Newman had to inch toward 60 before receiving his due acclaim for roles that were neither heroes nor heels: His Frank Galvin, an alcoholic lawyer, something of a sad joke among those Boston barristers who take notice of him, scrounges up one last case that will expose venalities in the medical establishment and the Catholic Church. For once playing someone viewed with contempt, not envy, Newman did full justice to a wizened creature in a movie whose “winter light,” David Thomson wrote, “got through his mask and into a raw soul.” It earned Newman the cover of TIME and his sixth Oscar nomination. He lost to Gandhi.
Newman, who accused himself of “emotional Republicanism” in his early films, put that starchy reticence to grand use as Walter Bridge. A Kansas City burgher of the 1950s, long wed to the livelier India (Woodward), Walter deals with life’s disappointments and compromises with a stiff upper ventricle; but Newman manages to reveal, without placarding them, the nuances of a character so different from his own. Or was it? “Joanne says, ‘That’s the real you,’” Newman told a 1998 interviewer. In their 50 years of marriage, Newman starred with Woodward in 11 movies, directed her in five, including the Oscar-nominated Rachel, Rachel and the finest version of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie to make it to film. Mr. & Mrs. Bridge might be the most delicate and mature work either of them did.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
