Intimate portrait of Newman marriage

LEGENDARY actress Joanne Woodward — the widow of Paul Newman — is now 92 years old and suffering from Alzheimer’s.

However, I’m told that she has seen, and approved of, a major new documentary about their marriage and their dazzling, glamorous life together.

‘I have to tell you she’s thrilled,’ the documentary’s producer Emily Wachtel tells me. ‘I have shown her extracts and she likes it very much.’ Wachtel spent seven years making The Last Movie Stars, and was able to draw on many hours of home movies, and personal letters between Newman and Woodward, to take an intimate look at the couple.

Their 50-year marriage weathered infidelity, alcohol abuse and the tragic early death of

Newman’s estranged drug addicted son, Scott. Woodward, an accomplished actress and Oscar winner, was initially the more successful of the two, but was gradually eclipsed by her husband, and also constrained by the needs of their large family — with three daughters of their own and three children from his first marriage.

Crucially, Wachtel had the transcripts of audio tapes recorded by Newman when he was planning on writing his autobiography. In them, he reflects on his shortcomings as a father. ‘I taught ’em how to drive well. That’s probably the extent of my parenting.’

The charismatic star of Cool Hand Luke, The Sting and Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, recounted his life story to a friend, with a view to releasing a book; but later changed his mind and destroyed the tapes. However the transcripts were found after his death in 2008, and in the film, actor George Clooney reads Newman’s part and Laura Linney speaks for Woodward, who also recorded her thoughts on those tapes. (Work is ongoing to turn the transcripts into a book this autumn.)

Woodward and Newman were Wachtel’s godparents, and her best friend is their youngest daughter Clea. They grew up together in Connecticut. She told me: ‘I have known Joanne Woodward for my whole life. When I was a kid, she would make me sweaters, she would send me postcards at summer camp — more than my own parents did even. She is my hero.’

She added that after Newman died of lung cancer, at 83, she began to try to raise money to make a film about his wife, who had for a long time dwelt in her husband’s shadow.

‘It took some time to get all five girls [the daughters] signed off on it,’ she recalled. ‘But because they were married for 50 years, my idea of a film about Joanne morphed into a project about both of them, because you cannot do one without the other. After Paul died I was looking at footage with Clea. There was all this amazing home movie footage with house guests like Laurence Olivier and others and I thought: “My God, somebody has to do this.” So that’s how it started.’

Actor Ethan Hawke, who directed The Last Movie Stars, showed parts of it at the Cannes Film Festival.