Joanne Woodward

Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward (born February 27, 1930) is an American actress.

A star since the Golden Age of Hollywood, Woodward made her career breakthrough in the 1950s and earned esteem and respect playing complex women with a characteristic nuance and depth of character. She is one of the first film stars to have an equal presence in television. Her accolades include an Academy Award, three Primetime Emmy Awards, a British Academy Film Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. She is one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema and the oldest living Best Actress Oscar-winner.

Woodward is perhaps best known for her performance as a woman with dissociative identity disorder in The Three Faces of Eve (1957), which earned her an Academy Award for Best Actress and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama. In a career spanning more than six decades, Woodward starred or co-starred in many feature films, receiving four Oscar nominations (winning one), ten Golden Globe Award nominations (winning three), four BAFTA Film Award nominations (winning one), and nine Primetime Emmy Award nominations (winning three).

Woodward is the widow of actor Paul Newman, with whom she often collaborated either as a co-star, or as an actor in films directed or produced by him. Woodward's career is notable not only for its unusual longevity, but for the range and depth of roles which she played. In 1960, she became the first person to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In 1990, Woodward earned a bachelor's degree from Sarah Lawrence College at age 60, graduating alongside her daughter Clea.

Early life

Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward was born on February 27, 1930, in Thomasville, Georgia, the daughter of Elinor (née Trimmier) and Wade Woodward, Jr., who was vice president of publishing company Charles Scribner's Sons. Her middle names, "Gignilliat Trimmier", are of Huguenot origin. She was influenced to become an actress by her mother's love of film. Her mother named her after Joan Crawford. She has an older brother, Wade, Jr.

Attending the premiere of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta, nine-year-old Woodward rushed into the parade of stars and sat on the lap of Laurence Olivier, star Vivien Leigh's partner. She eventually worked with Olivier in 1977 in a television production of Come Back, Little Sheba. During rehearsals, she mentioned this incident to him, and he told her he remembered.

Woodward lived in Thomasville, then lived in Blakely and Thomaston before her family relocated to Marietta, Georgia, where she attended Marietta High School. She remains a supporter of Marietta High School and of the city's Strand Theater.

The family moved once again to Greenville, South Carolina, when she was a junior in high school, after her parents divorced. She attended and graduated from Greenville High School. She also performed at Greenville's Little Theater.

Woodward majored in drama at Louisiana State University, where she was an initiate of Chi Omega sorority, then headed to New York City to perform on the stage. There, she studied at the Actors Studio and also studied under Sanford Meisner in the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre.

Partnership with Paul Newman

Woodward, with husband, actor Paul Newman in a publicity photograph for the 1958 film The Long, Hot Summer

Woodward met Paul Newman on the set of the stage drama Picnic, in the early 1950s, and the two married on January 29, 1958, after his divorce from his first wife Jacqueline Witte was finalized. Woodward was soon an Academy Award winner, winning her Oscar on March 28. Although he was nominated many times, Newman would not achieve a win until 1986.

They appeared in many films together during the 1950s and '60s. The first was The Long Hot Summer (1958), followed by Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! (1958), From the Terrace (1960), Paris Blues (1961), and A New Kind of Love (1963). They returned to Broadway in Baby Want a Kiss (1964), which ran for more than a hundred performances. Woodward was also directed by her husband in many projects. The first of these was Newman's directorial debut, Rachel, Rachel (1968). Husband and wife both earned Golden Globe Awards and Oscar nominations. They also acted together in Winning (1969) and WUSA (1970).

Only two months after their wedding, Woodward won her first Academy Award. Newman got his first nomination later that year, 1958, for Cat On a Hot Tin Roof. Both at the top of their game as film stars, Woodward and Newman became a celebrity power couple and were featured in countless magazines and articles for the next fifty years. Woodward's family life, she felt, deepened at the expense of her film career. She later said:

Initially, I probably had a real movie-star dream. It faded somewhere in my mid-30s, 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.

Nevertheless, her acting career was successful and busy by any standard, as can be seen from the summary above. Her final screen performance with Newman was in the cable miniseries Empire Falls in 2005.

Personal life

Woodward was reported to have been engaged to author Gore Vidal before she married Paul Newman. However, there was no real engagement; Woodward claims that she was a beard for Vidal, who was bisexual. Woodward shared a house with Vidal in Los Angeles for a short time, and they remained friends.

Woodward first met Newman at their agent's office. They were both understudies for the play Picnic in 1953. In the midst of this they starred in The Long, Hot Summer in 1957. Newman divorced his wife Jackie Witte, with whom he already had three children, and married Woodward on January 29, 1958, in Las Vegas. On March 28 of the same year, Woodward won the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Three Faces of Eve. The couple remained married for 50 years until Newman's death from lung cancer on September 26, 2008. Woodward has said: "He's very good looking and very sexy and all of those things, but all of that goes out the window and what is finally left is, if you can make somebody laugh .... And he sure does keep me laughing." Newman attributed their relationship success to "some combination of lust and respect and patience. And determination."

When Paul Newman was asked, in an interview with Playboy magazine, how he remained faithful to Woodward, Newman responded, "I have steak at home; why go out for hamburger?"

Woodward has three daughters with Newman: Elinor Teresa "Nell" (1959), Melissa Stewart (1961), and Claire Olivia "Clea" (1965).

Woodward and Newman were mentors to Allison Janney, whom they had met when Janney, a Kenyon College freshman, was cast in a play that Newman directed. Janney acknowledged this support in a 2018 speech.

Woodward and Newman were active supporters of the Democratic Party. They were conspicuous supporters of Senator Eugene McCarthy in his unsuccessful 1968 presidential campaign, attending a benefit for his campaign at Arthur's Restaurant on April 1, 1968. Documents declassified in 2017 show that the National Security Agency had created a biographical file on Woodward as part of its monitoring of prominent US citizens whose names appeared in signals intelligence.

In 1988, Newman and Woodward established the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, a nonprofit residential summer camp, and year-round center named after the Wyoming mountain hideaway of the outlaws in Newman's film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The camp, located in Ashford, Connecticut, provides free services to 20,000 children and their families coping with cancer and other serious illnesses. In 2012, their daughter Clea Newman took charge of the camp's parent organization, the SeriousFun Children's Network.

In 1990, after working toward her bachelor's degree for more than 10 years, Woodward graduated from Sarah Lawrence College along with her daughter Clea. Paul 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?" In 1992, along with Newman, Woodward was awarded the Kennedy Center honors for lifetime achievement.

Woodward, widowed since 2008, lives in Westport, Connecticut, where she and Newman raised their daughters. She has retreated from public life since she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2007.