Joanne Woodward
Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward
Woodward pictured in the 1960’s
Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward (born February 27, 1930) is an American actress, producer, activist, and philanthropist. She is perhaps best known for her Academy Award-winning role in The Three Faces of Eve (1957).
Early Life
Woodward was born in Thomasville, Georgia, daughter of Elinor (née Trimmier) and Wade Woodward, Jr., who at one point was vice president of publisher 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 movies. Her mother named her after Joan Crawford, using the Southern pronunciation of the name – “Joanne.” Attending the premiere of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta, nine-year-old Woodward rushed out into the parade of stars and sat on the lap of Laurence Olivier, star Vivien Leigh’s partner and future husband. 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 that he remembered her doing it.
Woodward lived in Thomasville until she was in the second grade, when her family relocated to Marietta, Georgia, where she attended Marietta High School. She remains a booster of Marietta High, and of that city’s Strand Theater. They moved once again when she was a junior in high school, after her parents divorced. She graduated from Greenville High School in Greenville, South Carolina in 1947. Woodward won many beauty contests as a teenager. She appeared in theatrical productions at Greenville High and in Greenville’s Little Theatre, playing Laura Wingfield in their staging of The Glass Menagerie, directed by Robert Hemphill McLane. She returned to Greenville in 1976, to play Amanda Wingfield in another Little Theatre production of The Glass Menagerie. She had also returned in 1955 for the premiére of her debut movie, Count Three And Pray, at the Paris Theatre on North Main Street. 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.
Career – Early Career
In The Three Faces of Eve (1957), displaying “Eve Black,” the ‘bad girl’ personality
Woodward’s first film was a post-Civil War Western, Count Three and Pray, in 1955. She continued to move between Hollywood and Broadway, eventually understudying in the New York production of Picnic, which featured her future husband Paul Newman. The two were married in 1958, after their work together in the film The Long, Hot Summer. By that time, Woodward had starred in The Three Faces of Eve (1957), for which she won the 1957 Academy Award for Best Actress.
Films with Paul Newman
She appeared with husband Paul Newman in ten feature films:
The Long, Hot Summer (1958)
Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys! (1958)
From the Terrace (1960)
Paris Blues (1961)
A New Kind of Love (1963)
Winning (1969)
WUSA (1970)
The Drowning Pool (1975)
Harry & Son (1984)—(directed by Newman)
Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990)
Both appeared in the HBO miniseries Empire Falls but had no scenes together.
She starred in five films that Newman directed or produced but in which he did not star:
Rachel, Rachel (1968)
They Might Be Giants (1971)
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds—which featured their daughter, Nell Potts (1972)
The Shadow Box (1980)—(television movie)
The Glass Menagerie (1987)
Later Career
In The Stripper (1963)
Woodward has continued to act, in such films as Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973) opposite Martin Balsam, and Philadelphia (1993) in which she played the mother to Tom Hanks’ character, and in television. She appeared in the television films Sybil (1976), opposite Sally Field, and Crisis at Central High (1981). She was the narrator for Martin Scorsese’s screen version of The Age of Innocence (1993).
Woodward was a co-producer and starred in a 1993 broadcast of the play Blind Spot, for which she was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress – Miniseries or a Movie. She was executive producer of the 2003 television production of Our Town, featuring Newman as the stage manager (for which he was nominated for an Emmy Award.) She wrote the teleplay and directed a 1982 production of Shirley Jackson’s story Come Along with Me, for which husband Newman provided the voice of the character Hughie under the screen name of P. L. Neuman. In 1995, Woodward directed off-broadway revivals of Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy and Waiting for Lefty at the Blue Light Theater Company in New York.
Woodward served as the artistic director of the Westport Country Playhouse from 2001 to 2005.
She recorded a reading of singer John Mellencamp’s song “The Real Life” for his box set On the Rural Route 7609. In 2011, she narrated the Scholastic/Weston Woods film All the World.
Personal Life
Woodward was reported to have been engaged to author Gore Vidal prior to marrying Paul Newman. However, there was no real engagement: Vidal later claimed it was just a stunt to attract Newman’s attention. Woodward shared a house with Vidal in Los Angeles for a short time, and they remained friends.
Woodward had first met Newman in 1953. They later reconnected on the set of The Long Hot Summer in 1957. Woodward and Newman married 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’s Hollywood Walk of Fame Star
Woodward and Newman had three daughters: Elinor Teresa (1959), known on screen as Nell Potts and generally as Nell Newman, Melissa “Lissy” Stewart (1961), and Claire “Clea” Olivia Newman (1965). They also have two grandsons, by Lissy.
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 services to 20,000 children and their families coping with cancer, and other serious illnesses and conditions, free of charge.
In 1990, Woodward graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, along with her daughter Clea.[3] 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?”
Woodward currently resides in Westport, Connecticut.
