THE BEST OF TWO GREAT ACTORS

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) Paul Newman opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Tennessee Williams’s play was smoulderingly dysfunctional southern fare. Brick (Newman): “Lately, that finishin’ school voice of yours sounds like you was runnin’ upstairs to tell somebody the house is on fire.” Maggie (Taylor): ‘Is it any wonder? You know what I feel like? I feel all the time like a cat on a hot tin roof.” The Three Faces of Eve (1957) Joanne Woodward won the Academy Award for Best Actress playing the role of Eve White, a housewife with multiple personalities who suffers from dissociative identity disorder. Eve: “Honey, there are a lot of things you’ve never seen me do before! That’s no sign I don’t do ‘em!” Rachel, Rachel (1968) Newman directed his wife in this, as a spinster who lives with her mother above a funeral parlour. Joanne earned an Academy Award nomination for it. Cool Hand Luke (1967) Newman made petty crim Luke Jackson in a Florida prison farm his own. Harper (1966) Down-at-heel Los Angeles private dick Lew Harper is possibly Newman’s greatest ever role, up there maybe with pre-Raging Bull genius of his performance of pugilist Rocky Barbella (Graziano) in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) or, of course, ageing hustler “Fast Eddie” Felson in The Color Of Money (1986) for which Newman won an Oscar (Newman was, of course, Oscar-nominated in 1961 as “Fast Eddie” in The Hustler.) The Fugitive Kind (1960) Joanne is unforgettable, opposite Marlon Brando, as an nymphomaniac with a drink problem called Carol Cutrere: “Nobody lives around here! This is the local bone orchard!”