Early Awards

Paul Newman's popularity started with The Long, Hot Summer (dir. Martin Ritt, 1958) for which he received the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival.

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He next won the BAFTA Best Foreign Actor award for his role in The Hustler (dir. Robert Rossen, 1961) followed by other awards and dozens of nominations.

 

I am grateful to Curt Bochanyin, University of Chicago, for his help with sources to double-check some of the information.

Later Awards

Paul Newman continued receiving awards throughout his career. He received an Oscar for the Best Actor in a Leading Role for his performance in The Color of Money (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1986).

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Among his last major awards was a Silver Bear at the Berlinale International Film Festival for Best Actor in Nobody's Fool (dir. Robert Benton, 1995).

Paul Newman

Q: Was Paul Newman's mother Slovak?

Paul Newman was born on 26 January 1925 in Cleveland, OH. He died on 26 September 2008 in Westport, CT.

His mother, listed as Teresa or Theresa Fetsko in U.S. records (spelled as Fetzer in one of Newman's two biographies), was born in a village that has since been incorporated in Humenné, now in East Slovakia, in 1896. In turn, the nearby village of Ptičie claims her paternal ancestry. Her name would be spelled Tereza Fecko or Fecková in Slovakia today. She was baptized Roman Catholic, but converted to Christian Science as an adult in the U.S., where she immigrated as a child in order to to join her father several years after her mother's death. Paul Newman's father Arthur of Jewish German ancestry was her second husband.

She maintained contacts with some of her relatives in East Slovakia in the 1930s and again after World War II until the onset of communism. One of Paul Newman's biographies quoted him as saying that his mother was particularly influential in his younger years.