“Actors and writers need to come back to the theatre because it’s a place where you can learn. You have to pay your dues, and people who haven’t paid their dues in the theatre, I think, have a hard time creating a whole career.” – Joanne Woodward

Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward was born in Thomasville, Georgia. Her father was vice president of publishing company Charles Scribner’s Sons known for publishing American authors including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Stephen King, Robert A. Heinlein and Thomas Wolfe. Her mother, who loved movies, had influenced Joanne to become an actress. Woodward majored in drama at Louisiana State University then headed to New York City to perform on the stage.

She had a number of stage and TV roles and in 1953 was an understudy in Picnic at the Music Box Theatre, Broadway. She was unimpressed by a married 28-year-old supporting actor and fellow understudy who was making his Broadway debut who “looked like an ice-cream ad” and was “just a pretty face.” He, however, was captivated by the 22-year-old Woodward: “She was modern and independent, whereas I was shy and a bit conservative. It took me a long time to persuade her that I wasn’t as dull as I looked.” The actor was Paul Newman.

Joanne Woodward’s first feature film was a 1955 CinemaScope western film, Count Three and Pray, starring Van Heflin and Raymond Burr. Woodward had second billing and signed a long term contract with Fox in January 1956.

Her third feature was her first film starring role. The Three Faces of Eve (1957) was a CinemaScope mystery drama about a real case of a woman with dissociative identity disorder (then known as multiple personality disorder). The film itself received mixed reviews though the critics were united in their praise for Joanne Woodward. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote that Woodward played her part “with superlative flexibility and emotional power,” but that “when you come right down to it, this is simply a melodramatic exercise—an exhibition of psychiatric hocus-pocus, without any indication of how or why. It makes for a fairly fetching mystery, although it is too verbose and too long.” The Three Faces of Eve received only one Oscar nomination, fittingly for Woodward’s performance. At the 1958 Academy Awards Joanne Woodward received the Best Actress award for her portrayal of Eve White, Eve Black and Jane, becoming the first actress to win an Oscar for portraying three different personalities.

In 1957 Joanne Woodward was cast in The Long Hot Summer (1958) by director Martin Ritt who she had met while a student at the Actors’ Studio. Fellow ex-students, Anthony Franciosa, Lee Remick and Paul Newman were also cast by Ritt. Orson Welles co-starred, clashing with Ritt about such things as the interpretation of the lines, costume design and the position of Welles while shooting the scenes. At one point during the production, Welles informed Ritt that he did not want to memorize his lines, requesting instead that they be dubbed afterwards. Newman had divorced his first wife, Jackie Witte, and the chemistry that Woodward and Newman shared on screen was mirrored in their private lives. They married in Las Vegas on January 29, 1958, and honeymooned at Connaught Hotel in London.

The film was well-received by the critics but had a mediocre performance at the box-office. Time described Newman’s performance as “mean and keen as a cackle-edge scythe”. The publication also praised Woodward, stating her acting was delivered with “fire and grace not often seen in a movie queen”, but decried Welles’ acting as “scarcely an improvement” on his performance in his previous role, in Moby Dick.

Fox put the newly-weds back to work on Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys! (1958) an adaptation of the novel by Max Shulman, directed by Leo McCarey. Woodward then worked with Martin Ritt again on The Sound and the Fury (1959), starring opposite Yul Brynner and was directed by Sidney Lumet in The Fugitive Kind (1960), a box office disappointment. She co-starred with her husband again in From the Terrace (1960) a story of the estranged son of a Pennsylvania factory owner who marries into a prestigious family and moves to New York to seek his fortune. In the New York Times in 1975 Woodward admitted to having “affection” for the film “because of the way I looked like Lana Turner.”

Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman had three children together, Elinor Teresa “Nell” (1959), Melissa Stewart (1961), and Claire Olivia “Clea” (1965). Although Joanne Woodward continued her film and stage career motherhood and raising a family required compromises.

“Initially, I probably had a real movie-star dream. It faded somewhere in my mid-30’s when I realized I wasn’t going to be that kind of actor. It was painful. Also, I curtailed my career because of my children. Quite a bit. I resented it at the time, which was not a good way to be around the children. Paul was away on location a lot. I wouldn’t go on location because of the children. I did once, and felt overwhelmed with guilt.” – Joanne Woodward, Hre York Times interview. September 17, 1981

In 1968 Paul Newman made his directorial debut with Rachel Rachel, a film about a schoolteacher in smalltown Connecticut, whose sexual awakening and gaining of independence takes place in her mid-thirties. Newman concentrated on directing, Woodward’s co-stars were Estelle Parsons and James Olson. The film received four Oscar nominations, Best Picture (Paul Newman) Best Actress (Joanne Woodward), Best Supporting Actress (Estelle Parsons) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Stewart Stern)). Time observed, “Despite its failings, Rachel, Rachel has several unassailable assets . . . It is in the transcendent strength of Joanne Woodward that the film achieves a classic stature. There is no gesture too minor for her to master,,, By any reckoning, it is [her] best performance.”

In 1972 ewman again directed Joanne Woodward in a flim, the adaptation of Paul Zindel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds Woodward’s two daughters were played by Roberta Wallach(daughter of Eli Wallach) and her real-life daughter Elinor, stage name Nell Poots. Bridgeport Connecticut was used as a stand-in for Staten Island for domestic rather than artistic reasons; it was only 17 minutes from the Newmans’ family home. Roger Ebert approved of the Newman family’s movie: “the film is hard-edged enough to be less depressing than it sounds … Joanne Woodward’s performance is not like anything she’s ever done before … It serves notice that she is capable of experimenting with roles that are against type and making them work.” He added, “Paul Newman’s direction is unobtrusive; he directs as we expect an actor might, looking for the dramatic content of a scene rather than its visual style … And the performance by Nell Potts is extraordinary. She glows.”

In 1975 Woodward supported her husband in the crime thriller based upon Ross Macdonald’s novel The Drowning Pool. On the set, Joanne Woodward told the then seventeen-year-old Melanie Griffith, who was playing her daughter, that she had had three goals in life: Marry a movie star (Paul Newman), have beautiful babies (she had three), and win an Oscar (which she did in 1958). Melanie said that she adopted those goals for herself by marrying a movie star (Antonio Banderas), having beautiful babies (she also has three), but expressed frustration that she hasn’t won an Oscar, even though she was nominated in 1989 for the Best Actress Academy Award for Working Girl (1988)

In 1977 Joanne Woodward appeared in a British TV production of Come Back, Little Sheba as part of the anthology series Laurence Olivier Presents. The plot involved an emotionally remote recovering alcoholic (Olivier) and his dowdy, unambitious wife (Woodward) facing a personal crisis when they take in an attractive lodger (Carrie Fisher). Joanne Woodward told Olivier that when she was 9-year-old, she had attended the premiere of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta, Georgia. She had rushed into the parade of stars and sat on the lap of Laurence Olivier, partner of star Vivien Leigh who played Scarlett O’Hara. Olivier told her he vividly remembered the incident.

The 1980s brought Woodward more TV movies until her role in the 1987 drama The Glass Menagerie, directed by her husband. She starred opposite John Malkovich. Newman then came in front of the camera to star alongside her in the Merchant Ivory production Mr and Mrs Bridge (1990). Woodward gained her fourth Best Actress Academy Award nomination for her role.

In the 1990s Joanne Woodward’s acting career wound down. She had made ten films with her husband Paul Newman directing or co-starring and had won an Oscar, a BAFTA, two Golden Globes and three Primetime Emmys for her work over 40 years. In 1988 Newman and Woodward established the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, a nonprofit residential summer camp, and year-round centre in Ashford, Connecticut providing services free of charge to children and their families coping with cancer. In 1990, Woodward graduated with a liberal arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College, along with her daughter Clea.[ Newman delivered the commencement address, during which he said he dreamed that a woman had asked, “How dare you accept this invitation to give the commencement address when you are merely hanging on to the coattails of the accomplishments of your wife?”

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