In the legendary world of the Actors Studio in the 1950s, Woodward stood out for her exceptional craftsmanship and Newman, in a reversal of standard gender conventions, for a physical presence that seemed to imprison him. Like Marilyn Monroe, he came there to study, already beset by insecurities that were then compounded in the formidable company of actors—Brando, James Dean, Geraldine Page, and Karl Malden—who were considered the greatest of their generation.
Woodward’s career was the first to emerge. Newman was captivated by his wife’s talent, but it turned out she also had the ability to elicit his own. The sexual personality that seemed to be an integral part of him was, in his own words, the creation of his wife. Once, Newman came home to their house in Westport, Connecticut, and Joanne found a crazy-colored outhouse with ad hoc furnishings—a place for them, she told him, to retreat into their carnality. (The film is based on thousands of pages of transcribed interviews with Newman, his friends, relatives, directors, who are voiced by prominent actors, most of whom, like Laura Linney and Bobby Cannavale, were hatched in New York’s theater.) The couple’s intimacy deepened Newman, revealing what he wasn’t sure he really owned.
When the monument to her husband’s iconic statue was finally built, Woodward threw herself into her household obligations. There were six children in all – the three girls the couple had together and the two daughters and a son, who died of a drug overdose in the late 1970s, which Newman shared with his first wife. Woodward was an excellent mother in every way, so much so that one of her stepchildren had the name “Joanne Woodward” tattooed on her forearm. Stephanie Newman, interviewed in the film, adored her despite the fact that her own mother was devastated by her father’s betrayal – not only because she was left for someone else, but because she also wanted to be an actress. In 1958, the first Mrs. Newman had to endure the insult of her ex-husband’s very public new marriage and the fact that Woodward, only in his twenties, had received the Academy Award for Best Actress in the same year.
Woodward was honored for her performance in “The Three Faces of Eve,” a film about multiple personality disorder whose subtext of maternal dissatisfaction would, in retrospect, predict her own ambivalent relationship to family life. Eve White, a frustrated housewife, develops two other identities; while inhabiting one of them, she tries to strangle her daughter with a curtain, until her husband stops her. In an old interview in the documentary, Woodward confesses what no mother should ever say: that if she had to do it all over again, she’s not sure she would have had children. The professional sacrifices were piled too high.
