Trigger Warning: The following references sexual assault.The Pacific-blue eyes. The aquiline nose. The puckish grin. The lean physique. They all added up to make Paul Newman even greater than the sum of his parts. In films like 1958’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and 1962’s Sweet Bird of Youth, the Oscar-winning actor was the embodiment of the term “matinee idol.” His ability to combine innocence and naïveté with an intense sense of lurking animalism drew moviegoers to him like magnets to a steel blade. Newman came into his own as a sex symbol in director Martin Ritt‘s 1958 melodrama The Long, Hot Summer. Standing shirtless in the steamy evening Mississippi heat outside Joanne Woodward‘s bedroom, clutching a pillow and calling out, “Clara! Claaara!” Newman was the man every woman (and more than a few men) wanted to invite inside the house. Film critic Fiona Underhill described the star-making scene as Newman doing “…some smoldering in her (Woodward’s) direction while the sweat glistens off his forty-seven stomach muscles in the moonlight and she (understandably) clutches her chest.” Director Martin Ritt, clearly aware of the young actor’s almost hypnotic influence on audiences, was certain Newman was the right choice to play callous rogue Hud Bannon in 1963’s Hud, the big screen adaptation of Larry McMurtry‘s (Brokeback Mountain screenwriter) 1961 novel Horseman, Pass By.
