JimK:  Sad.  The list of films in which Paul Newman was outstanding is immense.  On top of being a great actor, he was a movie star.  You know what I mean.  That *it* thing that makes an actor bigger than they are, better than they should be, makes people pay attention to them regardless of what is happening around them?  He had it. Beyond that, he was as much a consummate Renaissance man as we see these days.  He did everything that interested him and excelled at much of it.  You may or may not agree with his political views (and this is not an invitation to debate them!) but he was passionate about them.  He was married to Joanne Woodward for 50 years.  We could all learn a lot from his entire life.

I’ll never forget certain movies he made, like everyone else.  The Hustler.  The Color of Money.  Cool Hand Luke.  Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid.  Fort Apache the Bronx.  I loved him in The Hudsucker Proxy.  But I also remember seeing him in The Towering Inferno.  It was a few years after it was made, I’m pretty sure I saw it on one of the cable movie networks in the late 70s.  I know I was very young, no more than 10.  And I knew that guy was cool in a way that men should be.  He and Steve McQueen were one side of the coin, and Clint Eastwood was the other.  I don’t know why that movie stuck in my head as it wasn’t very good, but it has stayed there for decades.

Looking back, if I had to pick five films that shaped my little brain, they would be:

1. Star Wars (the first one, dammit, A New Hope)
2. Papillon
3. Cool Hand Luke
4. Dirty Harry
5. The Towering Inferno

I know, one of these things is not like the other.  Like I said, I don’t know why Inferno stuck, it just did.

You know what else always sticks in my head when it comes to Newman movies? Nobody’s Fool.  I thought he was phenomenal in that movie.

You know what else?  I love almost every single Newman’s Own product.  They are all better than whatever they compete against.  They always taste a little better, and have better ingredients, and often cost the same or less than the basic brands, even though they compete in taste with the higher-end stuff.  Now much of that success is due to the company, but he kept his hand in there all the way, from writing the blurbs on packages to tasting product to dreaming up new things…and of course distributing the profits to charities.

I know they say cancer killed him in the end, but I don’t believe it.  I think it was something else.  I think it was the all the eggs.

Because nobody can eat fifty eggs.