The sadness behind Butch Cassidy’s eyes

The Extraordinary Life Of An Ordinary Man: A Memoir

Paul Newman Century £25 ★★★★★

Paul Newman died, aged 83, in 2008 after a six-decade career at the peak of the Hollywood film business. He won Oscar nominations for Best Actor (finally winning in 1987 for The Color Of Money), enjoyed a famously 50-yearlong marriage and, with more than half a billion dollars raised for charity, earned a deserved reputation as a philanthropist – something he saw as his greatest legacy. Hardly ordinary.

This memoir is based on recorded interviews that Newman made between 1986 and 1991 with his friend, the screenwriter Stewart Stern, interspersed with largely uncritical, recorded interviews with friends and industry colleagues, the transcripts of which have been recently unearthed and heavily edited.

Newman saw it mainly as a project of self-dissection,

‘to explain it all to my kids’.

The fact that he subsequently destroyed the audio recordings makes one wonder whether, despite the project’s support from his children, he really wanted to bare his soul to his adoring public in this way.

And bare his soul he does.

For this is not your usual Hollywood celebrity memoir. There is little on the mechanics and dynamics of movie-making, no backstage gossip or ‘kiss and tell’ revelations. This is an exercise in soul-searching, in public therapy.

It reveals a persona far removed from the image of

the easy-going, laid-back, blue-eyed screen idol from such classics as Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (in which he starred with Robert Redford, right), The Hustler and Cool Hand Luke, to name but three of the nearly 60 films he made.

The book is arranged chronologically, and takes us from his damaging upbringing in Shaker Heights, Ohio, during the Great Depression, through his troubled, rowdy youth, navy service in the Pacific, a failed first marriage, his fledgling attempts to become an actor, to his transformative meeting with future wife, Joanne Woodward. His big professional break happens in 1955 when James Dean dies in a car accident and Newman takes over his part in The Battler, a TV version of a Hemingway short story.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Newman comes across as a decent but flawed and complicated man: distant and reserved, racked with guilt and self-doubt, he is brutally honest as he reveals problems with his drinking, his guilt about his first marriage and the death of his son.

He is self-deprecating about his success and, while aware of his own good looks, considers himself an impostor.

At the core of his general low self-esteem was undoubtedly the difficult, unresolved relationship with his formidable, smothering, narcissistic mother, with whom he eventually broke off contact, thereby making himself, in his own words, ‘the orphan and the ornament’.

There is a deep, underlying sadness at the heart of this revelatory book. You hope he managed to find some contentment in the last remaining 20 years of his extraordinary life after giving these interviews.