26 January: Paul Newman

Paul Newman was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio on this date in 1925. Here are 10 things you might not know about him.

1. Acting wasn’t his first choice of career. He attended college on a football scholarship, but got kicked off the team for fighting. This was when, possibly influenced by his mother’s love of theatre, he decided to study drama.
2. He served in WWII as a radioman and rear gunner in Hawaii. He had started to train to be a pilot but it was discovered he was colour-blind which put an end to that. He narrowly escaped getting killed when his pilot went down with an ear infection and the whole crew was grounded. The rest of the unit were on board a ship which was targeted by a kamikaze attack.
3. The first starring role he had was in a film called The Silver Chalice, about a Greek slave who crafts the cup used during the Last Supper. The film was a flop, and Newman later admitted that he hated it.
4. In 1969 he starred in a film called Winning, about car racing. This gave Newman a lifelong passion for the sport. At 70, he was part of the winning team in the 1995 Daytona 24-Hours sports car endurance race making him the oldest driver to win that race. His love of racing would also net him a voice role in the Pixar film Cars, as Doc Hudson, the retired racing car.
5. He was a dab hand in the kitchen, too, and enjoyed making salad dressings, which he gave as Christmas gifts to friends and neighbours. One of his neighbours in 1980 was Martha Stewart who reported that a blind taste test had gone in favour of Newman’s recipe. Newman agreed to put his face on the bottle and call it Newman’s Own. The dressing and other foods added later did very well. Newman donated all the profits to charity. By 2015, the company had delivered about $430 million to charitable causes.
6. Newman, a Democrat by politics, found himself on Richard Nixon’s list of enemies because he’d supported 1968 presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey and was against the war in Vietnam. By coincidence, the two men were sharing the use of a car at one point, with Nixon and Newman both using a Jaguar from a car hire dealer for part of the week. Newman left a note for Nixon saying Nixon should find no trouble operating a car with a “tricky clutch.” Newman would later get a copy of Nixon’s enemies list with his name on it and have it framed.
7. He was a bit of a practical joker and frequently played pranks on directors, which often involved faking his own death. While making Slap Shot, he crawled behind the wheel of a wrecked car and pretended he had been in an accident, and while making Exodus, made director Otto Preminger collapse in shock when he threw a dummy off a roof to make it look like he’d fallen or jumped to his death.
8. On realising that he and his male co-star in the film Twilight in 1998 were being paid way more than Susan Sarandon, despite her having equal billing with them, he offered to give part of his salary to her to even things up.
9. Newman was married twice. His first marriage was to Jackie Witte. He divorced her after meeting Joanne Woodward during the production of Picnic on Broadway. He and Woodward stayed married for 50 years, until Newman’s death in 2008. They made 16 films together and were among the first Hollywood couples to move out of California to bring up their families. They lived in Westport, Connecticut.
10. It’s alleged that Newman once commented that there were 24 beers in a case, and 24 hours in a day, and that this is surely not a coincidence. This led students at his old college to start a tradition called Newman Day, on which students try to drink 24 beers in 24 hours. Newman himself disapproved of this behaviour and asked that Princeton University disassociate the event from his name.

Character birthday

Repp: Repp is the grandson of the founder of Hyperion Engineering. As such, he was born into a rich and privileged family and never needed to work. He also inherited a probability altering suit from his grandfather, the origin of which is unknown. He is a member of Combat Team Gamma. He is known for his playboy nature and is somewhat unreliable. He will always turn up for Combat Team fixtures, but often skips training sessions.