So sad, but not completely unexpected since he had been looking so frail of late. He died at age 83. Still too soon for such a great one. My kids asked "Who died?" when they heard me gasp at the NY Times picture. "What movies was he in?" How to explain to kids the likes of Absence of Malice, Road to Perdition, Hud, and Butch Cassiday and the Sundance Kid. I finally remembered that he was the voice of Hud in the animated Cars which was probably their only exposure. And then I showed them the salad dressing bottle from the fridge! He gave millions to charity. A class act all around.
Read the obit in the NY Times here.
“I’m not able to work anymore as an actor at the level I would want to,” Mr. Newman said last year on the ABC program “Good Morning America.” “You start to lose your memory, your confidence, your invention. So that’s pretty much a closed book for me.”
But he remained fulfilled by his charitable work, saying it was his greatest legacy, particularly in giving ailing, often dying children a camp at which to play.
“We are such spendthrifts with our lives,” Mr. Newman once told a reporter. “The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”
Ugh. Major loss.
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