Joanne Woodward — Actress, Three Women in One Performance and Fifty Years of Paul Newman

Biography

From Thomasville to Eve White, Eve Black, and Jane

Born Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward on February 27, 1930, in Thomasville, Georgia — the daughter of a publishing company vice-president and a mother who took her to films from infancy. She studied drama at Louisiana State University, enrolled at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse and studied with Sanford Meisner, and made her Broadway debut in 1955. She met Paul Newman in 1953 when they were both understudies in the Broadway production of Picnic; he was married; they began an affair; he divorced and they married in 1958, the same year she won the Academy Award. They remained married for fifty years until his death in 2008.

Nunnally Johnson's The Three Faces of Eve (1957) required her to play a woman with three distinct personalities — the timid housewife Eve White, the reckless Eve Black, and the integrated Jane — each differentiated not by costume or makeup but by posture, vocal register, and the quality of attention the character brings to the same face and body. She was twenty-seven. The Oscar was the first ever awarded for a performance based on a multiple-personality case, and it was awarded to the right person.

Martin Ritt's Rachel, Rachel (1968) — directed by Newman — gave her Rachel Cameron, the thirty-five-year-old schoolteacher in a small Connecticut town whose entire life has been organised around the avoidance of experience, who begins a tentative movement toward it in a single summer. The second Oscar nomination and the most complete statement of the quality that made her distinctive: the psychological precision with which she inhabited a character whose interior life was larger than her exterior circumstances.

She continued to work in film and extensively in television and theatre through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s — collaborating repeatedly with Newman in films including The Long Hot Summer, From the Terrace, Paris Blues, WUSA, The Drowning Pool, and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), for which she received her fourth Oscar nomination. She produced, directed, and served as artistic director of the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut. She has largely withdrawn from public life since Newman's death in 2008.

1930

Born in Thomasville, Georgia; publishing family; films from infancy

1953

Meets Newman in Picnic understudies; he is married; the long patience begins

1958

Oscar won — Three Faces of Eve; marries Newman; same year

1968

Rachel, Rachel — Newman directs; second nom; the precision deepens

1990

Mr. and Mrs. Bridge — fourth nom; Merchant Ivory; the late career peak

2008

Newman dies; fifty years of marriage; Westport Playhouse; the quiet

Filmography

From Three Faces of Eve to Mr. and Mrs. Bridge

1957Drama · Nunnally Johnson · Multiple Personality

The Three Faces of Eve

Nunnally Johnson's psychiatric case-study film — Woodward as Eve White, Eve Black, and Jane: three personalities inhabiting one woman, differentiated entirely by performance rather than costume. The Oscar at twenty-seven; the first multiple-personality performance in Academy Award history; and the demonstration that the instrument she brought to the role was operating at full capacity from the first significant film she made.

Oscar Win

The three Eves are not varieties of the same character but fully realised separate people — Eve White's constricted physicality, Eve Black's physical ease, Jane's integration of both — and the transitions between them require Woodward to perform in real time the psychological process the film is describing. The case on which the film was based involved a real woman whose actual name was kept secret until 1977 when she identified herself as Chris Costner Sizemore; she later said Woodward's performance was accurate in ways that had seemed impossible without having known her personally.

1968Drama · Paul Newman Directing · Connecticut

Rachel, Rachel

Paul Newman's directorial debut — Woodward as Rachel Cameron, the thirty-five-year-old schoolteacher in a small Connecticut town who has organised her entire life around the avoidance of change, and who makes tentative, painful movements toward experience across a single summer. Newman's direction and Woodward's performance together constitute one of American cinema's most compassionate portraits of a life lived at the edge of its own possibilities.

Oscar Nom

Rachel's immobility — the life organised around not-happening, the fear that has made the avoidance of experience into a system — is played by Woodward as a fully inhabited psychological reality rather than a condition to be overcome. The film's compassion is that it doesn't treat Rachel's situation as a problem requiring solution but as a life requiring understanding. Newman said directing Woodward was the easiest and most frightening professional experience of his life — easy because she brought everything required; frightening because he could see exactly how complete it was.

1990Drama · Merchant Ivory · Newman Again

Mr. and Mrs. Bridge

James Ivory's dual-portrait film — Woodward as India Bridge, the wife of a Kansas City conservative lawyer (Paul Newman) whose interior life the era gives her no language to express. Her fourth Oscar nomination and the most complex performance of her late career: a woman whose feelings exist entirely below the level at which the culture permits her to acknowledge them, played with absolute fidelity to that constraint.

Oscar Nom

India Bridge's tragedy is the tragedy of a sensibility for which no vocabulary has been provided — a woman who feels everything and has been formed by a world that requires her to show nothing, whose love for her husband is real and her frustration with his limitations equally real, and who has no way of expressing either that the era would sanction. Woodward and Newman made the film together at sixty and sixty-five respectively, and it is the most complete expression of what fifty years of shared work had produced between them.

1963Drama · Martin Ritt · Southern Gothic

The Long, Hot Summer

Martin Ritt's Faulkner adaptation — Woodward as Clara Varner, the schoolteacher daughter of a domineering Mississippi patriarch (Orson Welles) who falls into a complicated courtship with a charming drifter (Newman). The first Newman-Woodward film collaboration; the chemistry on screen was indistinguishable from what had already developed off it, which is the definition of casting that works.

Clara's intelligence — the woman who sees through every performance the men around her are giving, who has no illusions about her father or the drifter, who chooses the drifter anyway because she has correctly identified the quality beneath the performance — is played by Woodward with the precision she brought to every role: the character's understanding always slightly ahead of the audience's, which creates the specific pleasure of watching a genuinely intelligent performance. The film was made while Newman was still legally married to his first wife; the off-screen situation informed and complicated everything on it.

Honors

One Oscar — Four Nominations — Fifty Years of the Finest Partnership in Hollywood

Academy Award — Best Actress

1958

The Three Faces of Eve

Won at twenty-seven for three personalities in one performance — the first multiple-personality Oscar, awarded for a piece of technical and psychological achievement that has not been equalled in American cinema. She married Paul Newman the same year.

Oscar Won

Four Oscar Nominations

1958 · 1969 · 1974 · 1991

Career Span

Three Faces of Eve, Rachel Rachel, Summer Wishes Winter Dreams, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge — four nominations across thirty-three years, each for a performance of entirely different character, confirming a range and depth that the relative scarcity of great roles for women of her generation consistently underexposed.

4 Nominations

The Newman Partnership

1958 — 2008

Fifty Years

Fifty years of marriage, numerous film collaborations, six children, and a sustained creative partnership that produced work neither could have made separately. Asked how they had stayed together so long in an industry famous for failure, Newman said he had simply never seen anyone better.

Fifty Years

Westport Country Playhouse

2000 — Present

Artistic Director

Her work as artistic director of the Westport Country Playhouse — reviving a historic Connecticut theatre, commissioning new work, directing productions — represents the conviction that the craft is larger than the career, and that the work of sustaining institutions matters as much as the work of inhabiting them.

Theatre Director

Artistic Identity

The Precision That Lived Below the Surface

The Psychological Instrument

Her specific quality — traceable to the Neighborhood Playhouse training and the Meisner technique — is the capacity to inhabit an interior state so completely that the exterior becomes merely its expression. Eve White, Rachel Cameron, India Bridge: three completely different women, made from the inside out, differentiated not by surface but by the structure of feeling beneath it.

The Newman Shadow

Her career has been shadowed by Newman's — the more commercially celebrated husband casting a retrospective shade over work that was independently excellent. The injustice is clear in the four nominations and the body of work they represent: a performer of extraordinary range who worked in a period when great roles for women were scarce and who found distinction in the ones she had.

The Southern Roots

Georgia and Louisiana shaped her understanding of the interior lives that social constraint produces — the Southern woman whose feelings are larger than the forms available to express them, whose intelligence operates in the space between what is said and what is meant. Rachel Cameron and India Bridge are Northern variants of a Southern original.

The Long Marriage

Fifty years with the same person in an industry that treats marriages as provisional is itself a form of performance — the sustained commitment to something beyond the self that the best acting also requires. Newman said he had never seen anyone better. The marriage and the craft were expressions of the same discipline.

Legacy

Three Women in One — Fifty Years of the Same One

Joanne Woodward's legacy is the psychological precision — the capacity to inhabit an interior state so completely that the character's feelings are present before they are expressed — that produced Eve White, Eve Black, and Jane simultaneously in her first major film, and Rachel Cameron, India Bridge, and a dozen others across the following four decades. Four Oscar nominations across thirty-three years confirm a range that the scarcity of great roles for women of her generation consistently underexposed.

The fifty-year marriage and the Westport Playhouse are the legacy's other dimensions: the conviction that the work of sustaining partnerships and institutions matters as much as the work of inhabiting roles. Newman said he had simply never seen anyone better. The marriage lasted fifty years. Both assessments were correct and neither was sufficient.

Academy Award Won

The Three Faces of Eve, 1958

Oscar Nominations

Across 33 years

Years Married to Paul Newman

1958 to 2008

Age at Oscar Win

Youngest lead actress, 1958