One more film and that's it, says Newman
At 80, Paul Newman is considering retirement.
The movie legend, whose golden looks and piercing blue eyes have lit up screens for five decades, says he plans to give up the activities he once described as his two great passions – acting and motor racing.
“I think both are winding down,” Newman said in London today. ”I’ll probably race for another year.”
Fans of the iconic star of The Hustler and Cool Hand Luke need not despair just yet. Newman says he plans to make one last film – “Just one more for good luck.”
He won’t say what it is, but hints that a long-rumoured reunion with Robert Redford, his co-star in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, may yet happen.
“I hate to talk about anything until the papers are drawn up, but we’ve been looking for something for 20 years and now we’re looking harder,” Newman said. “I hope something will come of it.”
Newman, whose film career began in 1954 with The Silver Chalice – a creaky costume drama he quickly disowned – has been a keen motorsports fan since he starred in the 1968 racing film Winning and still competes regularly. In January he escaped injury when the car he was testing caught fire following a spin at Daytona International Speedway.
But he says he plans to give up the thrill of the track to spend more time with his wife of 47 years, Joanne Woodward.
“Joanne is the artistic director of the Westport Country Playhouse” – a theatre near the couple’s Connecticut home – “and her duties will stop this year,” Newman said. “If my racing stops, the two of us will be together, spend some time just horsing around.”
In London to promote a deal between his Newman’s Own range of salad dressings and fast-food giant McDonald’s, Newman sat in a McDonald’s branch on London’s busy Oxford Street, surrounded by fast-food executives and a British television crew.
The actor turned 80 in January; he moves a little stiffly and strains to hear occasionally. But his clear skin and sparkling eyes are as vivid as ever, and his passion for his business and charitable work is undimmed.
Newman’s salad dressings, pasta sauces and popcorn have raised £90 million for charity since the actor and his friend AE Hotchner started the company as a lark in 1980, offering Newman’s home-made dressing for sale in a few shops near his Westport, Connecticut home.
The company now has a headquarters staff of 18 and produces dozens of products, from steak sauce to lemonade. Newman says he still tastes every batch of their products, and all profits go to charity.
The company has supplied McDonald’s restaurants in the US with salad dressing since 2003; a range of low-fat Newman’s Own dressings will be available in British, Irish and Danish branches of the chain starting in June.
Regularly voted among the greatest movie stars of all time – he ranked Number One in a 2001 British survey of screen legends – Newman has been nominated nine times for acting Oscars, and won the best actor prize in 1986 for The Colour of Money.
But he says he is proudest of his charity work, especially the Hole in the Wall summer camps for seriously ill children in the US, Ireland, Britain, Israel, France and southern Africa.
