There are some truly iconic Hollywood couples. Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Danny De Vito and Rhea Perlman. And I think Joanne Woodward would cheerfully give up the thing that makes her relationship most distinct, because it’s that I’m pretty sure she has outlived her partner by the longest. Paul Newman died over a decade ago. While Woodward, now 90, was one of my “please live long enough so I don’t have to alter the schedule” people, the fact remains that she is still alive. She’s not really doing the work of running the charity anymore, but she’s still alive.

Her love of show business goes back to childhood. As a young girl, she went to the premiere of Gone With the Wind, where she basically gate-crashed and ended up watching the movie on Laurence Olivier’s lap. Wikipedia says he remembered this later, which of course he did. A random nine-year-old named after Joan Crawford sat on his lap; how do you not remember that?

I wonder some if there was a conflict in her household over the fact that she won an Oscar for 1957’s The Three Faces of Eve and he didn’t win a competitive one until The Color of Money, a year after getting a lifetime achievement award. And seven before he won the Hersholt, which in my opinion she should have shared. Because while he was the face of Newman’s Own, obviously, she was right there as involved as he was.

It does turn out that she resented his success a bit. She realized relatively early that she was never going to be a movie star, and he was pretty well the definition of it for a lot of years. She felt guilty about going on location with the kids, so she pretty well stayed home with them instead. But Paul was of course able to go on location without them. It is kind of the great dilemma of actresses, and one wonders what solution they would have come to if she’d had the career of, say, Faye Dunaway instead.

It’s also worth noting that she and her husband both had careers going back to the early days of television. She did more of it than he did; she even did my beloved Lux Video Theatre. In fact, she did a lot of those shows where the name of the show has the sponsor in it. Kraft. United States Steel. Alcoa. Philco Television. That sort of thing. We don’t talk a lot about those days of television, I think, and I hope someone’s getting her memories of those times now.

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