Paul Newman directed this moving adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ classic play The Glass Menagerie. Joanne Woodward stars as aging Southern belle Amanda Wingfield, whose domineering parenting has driven her shy, timid daughter Laura (Karen Allen) inward and has made her adventure-hungry son Tom (John Malkovich) miserable. Newman hasn’t tried to open the original stage play up at all, preferring to keep all of the action within the Wingfield apartment. The cast performed the play in a Broadway revival prior to the filming.
Screen legend, superstar, and the man with the most famous blue eyes in movie history, Paul Newman was born in 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a successful sporting goods store owner. He acted in grade school and high school plays and after being disharged from the navy in 1946 enrolled at Kenyon College. After graduation he spent a year at the Yale Drama School and then headed to New York, where he attended the famed New York Actors Studio. Classically handsome and with a super abundance of sex appeal, television parts came easily and, after his first Broadway appearance in “Picnic” (1953), he was offered a movie contract by Warner Brothers. His first film, The Silver Chalice (1954) was nearly his last. He considered his performance in this costume epic to be so bad that he took out a full-page ad in a trade paper apologizing for it to anyone who might have seen it. He fared much better in his next effort, Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), in which he portrayed boxer Rocky Graziano… read more