Sally Field couldn’t get over hearing Paul Newman complain about his career. Her Absence of Malice costar said nobody offered him roles, a grievance she remembers listening to with some disbelief.
“He’d always grumble about there was just — nobody ever offered him any roles,” she said in a Criterion interview. Field remembered her response: “I was going, ‘What?’”
Interviewer Isaac Butler wondered how that could be true, given the number of scripts he imagined Newman received. Field said Newman insisted otherwise. She remembered him being dissatisfied with his work and reluctant to talk about movies he had already made.
Criterion published the excerpt on September 18. The full conversation accompanies its restored edition of Hud, with Field discussing Newman and director Martin Ritt, who had worked with both of them.
Newman Wondered Why a Crowd Had Gathered
A crew was setting up a shot at the Miami Herald when Newman spotted people gathering nearby. He and Field were waiting to enter the scene, although she could no longer remember whether they were supposed to come down a staircase or make some other entrance. Newman asked what was going on.
Field recalled answering, “Paul Newman is here. Haven’t you heard?” She said the attention simply did not seem to occur to him. He had “a shyness about him,” even with a crowd waiting for a look at him.
Field Wasn’t a Fan of His Long Jokes
When Newman had a joke to tell, Field said, he would stop everything. He didn’t settle for one, either; she remembered him arriving with four long jokes to work through.
She thought they were terrible, though she remembered finding him funny in ordinary conversation. There was a “grumpiness” to him that she enjoyed. Left to himself, without the elaborate setup and punch line, he could make her laugh.
She thinks she did ask him about one of his old movies: Cool Hand Luke, and how he had managed all those hard-boiled eggs. Field mentioned the question while trying to remember whether they ever discussed his earlier performances, but she did not repeat his answer in the interview.
‘Absence of Malice’ Brought Newman His Fifth Oscar Nomination
In Sydney Pollack’s 1981 film, Newman’s Michael Gallagher finds himself named in a newspaper story linking him to a criminal investigation. Field plays Megan Carter, the reporter responsible for it. The information has been deliberately leaked to her, and Gallagher’s livelihood is threatened by its publication.
Newman had already received acting Oscar nominations for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, Hud and Cool Hand Luke. His fifth nomination came at the 1982 Oscars, where Absence of Malice also earned nominations for supporting actress Melinda Dillon and screenwriter Kurt Luedtke. Henry Fonda won the leading actor award for On Golden Pond.
Field had a best actress Oscar of her own by then, for Norma Rae. Ritt directed that film as well as Hud, and Field recalled him drawing on Newman’s earlier movie when he needed to give her a piece of direction.
During a Norma Rae scene in which Beau Bridges’ character proposes, she asks him for a kiss. Ritt wanted Field to think of Patricia Neal in Hud. Field told Butler that overt sexuality did not come naturally to her, but Neal’s earthy performance gave her an image she could use.
Field Had Her Own Way of Getting Past Her Nerves
Newman might not have understood why people gathered to see him, but Field knew what it was like to face him across a scene. In a CBS interview published in March 2017, Jane Pauley brought up the moment in Absence of Malice when Gallagher walks into the newsroom. Megan looks up and spills coffee across her desk.
Field joked that the reaction had required little acting. When Pauley asked how she managed to hold her own opposite Newman, Field said she had been tense about working with him and wanted to get that feeling out of the way. She then admitted to an approach she did not think she had discussed publicly before.
She became funny and exceptionally crude around him. “I was so vulgar, you can’t imagine,” Field said. Newman loved it, she recalled, and would laugh so hard that “he would fall on the ground.”