Celebrity Biographies
Joanne Woodward
Some people, when referring to Joanne Woodward, speak of “Paul Newman’s wife.” And it certainly has been, because despite the fact that for Newman it was his second marriage, their union lasted a whopping 50 years, and they were able to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary before his death from cancer. In any case, it should be remembered that Woodward was ahead in awards in the form of awards for her work, she won a well-deserved Oscar in 1958 for “The Three Faces of Eve.” Just the year they got married.
Joanne Woodward is a southern lady, she was born in Thomasville, in the state of Georgia, on February 27, 1930. It seems that she owes her name to the actress Joan Crawford , since her mother proposed the name in the form of “Joanne” for her hobby to the movies. An anecdote from her childhood is also symptomatic of her early relationship with the cinema, since when she was a girl, in a promotional act for Gone with the Wind, the man who would be the husband of the protagonist Vivien Leigh , Laurence Olivier , had her in his lap. Many, many years later, in 1977, both would work together in the tv-movie Little Sheba Comes Back .
Already at an early age Joanne showed great physical attractiveness, which made her stand out in the classic beauty pageants. Her first steps in her interpretation were on the theater stages of Greenville, South Carolina. There she gave evidence of her talent in works such as Tennessee Williams ‘ “The Glass Zoo” , which years later she would make into a film directed by her husband Paul Newman .
In the mid-’50s he had multiple jobs, including Momentum , an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents . Her film debut came thanks to Count to Three and Pray , alongside Van Heflin . He would combine the works in theater with those of the small and big screen. And in a theatrical production of “Picnic” it was where she met Paul Newman, the man of her life on screen and off screen, with whom she had three daughters. Well, together they shared plans in 11 films, in addition to the fact that he directed it in 5 films. The most important is undoubtedly The Long Hot Summer (1958), but One Day I’ll Be Back (1961) also stands out, both directed by Martin Ritt, who also directed her in The Sound and the Fury (1959). Of those films in which Newman was behind the camera and Woodward in front of it, Raquel stands out, Raquel (1968), where she gave life to a teacher in a vital crisis. About putting herself under her husband’s orders in her work, she reflected: “Who could lead you better than the person you live with? Paul knows everything there is to know about me. He wishes he could direct all the movies I make.”
In any case, before Newman was an inseparable part of his cinema, Joanna made The Three Faces of Eve (1957) under the orders of Nunnally Johnson, a remarkable drama that earned her an Oscar, to which she aspired again on three other occasions, by Raquel, Raquel , Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973) and Waiting for Mr. Bridge (1990).
With age, her career slowed down, but she had time to be the mother of Tom Hanks in Philadelphia (1990) and to be the narrator of The Age of Innocence in 1993, and to coincide with Newman, although not on the same level, in the miniseries Empire Falls (2005).