When one contemplates the greatest movie stars of all time, Paul Newman has to be at the top of that list. A career that spans six decades, bringing us some of the greatest films of all time --- including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and The Verdict --- he’s also known for his 50-year marriage to fellow actor Joanne Woodward.

But much like a Hollywood movie, behind the scenes, all that glitters is not always gold. Starting with a comfortable but emotionally spare childhood in Ohio, to his stint in the Navy and his early days in Hollywood, a fraught first marriage and his ongoing issues with alcohol, Newman always struggled to know himself better and learn from his experiences, good and bad. And here, in THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF AN ORDINARY MAN, we get to learn more about this incredible actor and philanthropist in his own words and the words of those who knew him best.

"[I]n THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF AN ORDINARY MAN, we get to learn more about this incredible actor and philanthropist in his own words and the words of those who knew him best."

Paul Leonard Newman was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, an affluent suburb of Cleveland, to parents Arthur Sr. and Tress. Arthur Sr. managed a local sports equipment store, and his marriage was tumultuous at best, according to friends. There was passion there, but mostly arguing and resentment. Tress channeled all her attention toward her youngest son, doting on him and dressing him up in feminine outfits, but still making him jump through hoops to gain her affection. Newman realized that he blocked out a great swath of his childhood: “[A]round when I started adolescence, something in me closed down. I don’t know what it was, but I began to feel like an outcast. I began to sense I was on the outside looking in, and didn’t even know what I was looking for inside.”

Filled with the bravado of youth, 18-year-old Newman joined the Navy in 1943. When a friend was killed on his very first exercise flight, he recalls, “I remember being stunned by the news, but I somehow didn’t connect it to myself…. Back then, there must have been a strange, wonderful sense of immortality. And my own evolving type of emotional anesthesia.” After being honorably discharged from the Navy in 1945, Newman headed off to Kenyon College on the G.I. Bill. It was here, after getting kicked off the football team for drinking, that he discovered acting. But knowing how shy and introverted he was, it certainly was a curious choice.

Right after graduation, Newman married his first wife, Jackie Witte, an ambitious actress who often participated in summer stock productions alongside him. Neither felt that their marriage was ever on solid ground. Despite Newman’s frequent absences as his career started to gain traction while hers languished, the pair had three children in quick succession. Still, Newman found himself immediately captivated by a young actress from Georgia named Joanne Woodward, who was cast as an understudy, along with himself, on the Broadway production of “Picnic” in 1953: “There came a point when I was really leading two lives. I was living my life with Jackie and I was living my life with Joanne. These were impossible times. Till then, I’d never had a sense of consequences, never suffered from them…. But now, with Jackie and Joanne, consequences began to weigh heavily on me. I was a failure as an adulterer.”

Where Newman wasn’t failing was in his career. After ascending to the lead role in “Picnic,” he soon became the “It Boy” in Hollywood. Following a disastrous biblical sword and sandal flop (The Silver Chalice), he was still being considered for the lead in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront when Marlon Brando hesitated. (Brando wised up and took the part.) But after James Dean’s untimely death, Newman was cast in roles meant for the late actor, including Somebody Up There Likes Me, playing the boxer Rocky Graziano. From this point, he worked consistently. And in 1958, he and Woodward married in Las Vegas and started their own family, adding three girls to the clan.

Forever in motion and hopping from location to location, Newman often pondered his failings as a parent and how his career might not be the best choice for someone in that role. His oldest child and only son, Scott, often felt dwarfed in his shadow. Still, though, he tried his hand at being an actor and a stuntman. After many years struggling with drug addiction, Scott died of an overdose in 1978 at the age of 28. Newman proceeded to throw himself into work…and drinking. Joanne Woodward commented, “I used to think the only peace Paul ever found was that peace he used to find in being dead drunk. Now he finds it in racing cars. Peace and grace, the comfort of knowing he has done something well.” So racing became his latest obsession, even competing in a race the year before he died.

In addition to his storied career, Newman still found time to be incredibly philanthropic. It started with the food line Newman’s Own, which contributes 100% of their profits after operation costs to charity, and continued with the Hole in the Wall Gang camps for seriously ill children, which he hoped would be his greatest legacy.

After years of trying to avoid deep reflection, the notoriously private Newman embarked on a memoir project with his friend, Stewart Stern. It yielded hours of interview tapes and transcripts from 1986 to 1991, but the amount of material seemed to overwhelm them. The result is this memoir, which is a perfect companion piece to Ethan Hawke’s recent HBO Max documentary series, “The Last Movie Stars.” There’s something about hearing the actual words from the memoirist that makes it all the more poignant, especially when they are no longer here. With a touching Foreword and Afterword from his daughters, we see that they are still gaining understanding and insights about their loving and complicated father.

On contemplating his own end, Newman --- with his wry sense of humor --- stated, “But I am convinced that this is only a dress rehearsal. And when I die and they put me in that box down in the ground, someone is going to yell, ‘Cut!’ Then a director will say, ‘OK, let’s go back to the number-one position, let’s get the cameras back there and shoot that scene all over again.’ And my box will open up again and some other life will be continued or pursued. I actually think I’ll die seven or eight times. It will all turn out to be some kind of joke.”