Paul Newman

Paul Newman was an American actor and film director. He was born on January 26, 1925 in Shaker Heights, Ohio. His dad, Arthur Samuel Newman was Jewish from Poland and Hungary, and his mother Theresa Fetzer was from Slovakia. Newman had no religion as an adult, but he described himself as “a Jew” because he thought it was “more of a challenge”.

Very early is his childhood, he realized that he was interested in theatre and his mother encouraged him. He made his acting debut at 7 years old in a school production of “Robin Hood”. But later in his life he was to become a pilot and served in the United States Navy in World War II in the Pacific Theatre, and enrolled in the Navy V-12 program at Ohio University, hoping to be accepted for pilot training. That’s how he discovered that he was color blind. Anyway, he worked on torpedo bombers as a rear-seat radioman and as a turret gunner until the end of the war.

Then, in 1949, he graduated from Kenyon College in Ohio and in 1954, he graduated in Drama from Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut. Right after his graduation, he made his Broadway theater debut with Kim Stanley in “Picnic” of William Inge. He also started his movie career in Hollywood the same year with “The Silver Chalice”, and from this time on, he went from movie to movie for the following 20 years and more. And in May 2007, Paul Newman announced that he would retire from acting because he didn’t feel he could continue acting at the level he wanted to.

Paul Newman was not only a wonderful actor and director, but he was also a businessman who founded with writer A.E. Hotchner, the “Newman’s Own”, a line of food products, in 1982. And, as an amazing philantropist he was,  he established a policy that all proceeds, after taxes, would be donated to charity, and as a result, in 2006, the company donated 250 million dollars to charities.