"I think that my sense of humor is the only thing that keeps me sane,"
he told Newsweek magazine in a 1994 interview.
1925 - 2008
"Remembering Paul Newman"
September 28, 2008

The television and web news have been full of the news of Newman's passing this Friday. Not only an actor and director, he was also "an activist, race car driver and popcorn impresario". He also was married for fifty years to Joanne Woodward, so rare, an enduring true love. However, I haven't seen very many of the films Paul Newman starred in. I've put it on my list to see _The Verdict_, and others he's done. Yet I've always known he was a 'superstar', as the news story referred to him.

I followed all of Wikipedia's links to photos of him. Oh, certainly his is a face I wanted to draw! I settled on two, one when he was fiftyish, and one when he was eightyish, which have him in a similar pose. It was interesting seeing the effects of aging, what changed and what remained the same.

As I sketched, those famous blue eyes would need no less than color. But even as just a linear sketch, those eyes seemed to wink at me with a transformation of familiarity. At first I saw my dad's blue eyes smiling at me. And then I saw Laura's blue eyes:

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Dad and Laura both took that pose, smile and all

Even now that my picture is done, I look at it, and it switches from Paul's to Dad's to Laura's eyes.

There are other commonalities, too. Newman died of lung cancer, after having been a smoker. That was my dad's fate as well, although Dad didn't make it as far as eighty three.

The last movie Newman ever starred in (except for _Cars_, in which he just gave his voice), was _Road to Perdition_. It was a hot summer day in July 2002, when Laura and I decided to go to the theater. Neither she nor I knew anything about the movies showing that day. But we took a chance on _Road to Perdition_, because Tom Hanks was in it. We figured he wouldn't star in anything lackluster. It was an engrossing movie about a mob father who hopes to save his son from the horrors of the life he has led. Both Hanks and Newman gave excellent performances.

It was also the last movie Laura and I ever saw together.