Joanne Woodward

Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward was born on February 27, 1930, in Thomasville, Georgia, the daughter of Elinor (née Trimmier) and Wade Woodward, Jr., who was vice president of publishing company Charles Scribner's Sons.[1][2] Her middle and maiden names, "Gignilliat Trimmier", are of Huguenot origin.[3] She was influenced to become an actress by her mother's love of movies.[3] Her mother named her after Joan Crawford – "Joanne".[3]

Attending the premiere of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta, 9-year-old Woodward rushed into the parade of stars and sat on the lap of Laurence Olivier, star Vivien Leigh's partner. She eventually worked with Olivier in 1977 in a television production of Come Back, Little Sheba. During rehearsals, she mentioned this incident to him, and he told her he remembered.[3]

Woodward lived in Thomasville until she was in the second grade, then lived in Blakely and Thomaston before her family relocated to Marietta, Georgia, where she attended Marietta High School. She remains a booster of Marietta High School and of the city's Strand Theater.[4]

They moved once again when she was a junior in high school after her parents divorced.[3] She graduated from Greenville High School in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1947. Woodward won many beauty contests as a teenager.

She appeared in theatrical productions at Greenville High and in Greenville's Little Theatre, playing Laura Wingfield in the staging of The Glass Menagerie. (She returned to Greenville in 1976 to play Amanda Wingfield in another Little Theatre production of The Glass Menagerie. She also returned in 1955 for the première of Count Three And Pray, her debut movie, at the Paris Theatre on North Main Street.)

Woodward majored in drama at Louisiana State University, where she was an initiate of Chi Omega sorority, then headed to New York City to perform on the stage.[3]

Documents declassified in 2017 show that the National Security Agency had created a biographical file on Woodward as part of its monitoring of prominent US citizens whose names appeared in signals intelligence.[5] She also studied acting under Sanford Meisner in the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre.[6][7]

Woodward was reported to have been engaged to author Gore Vidal before she married Paul Newman.[18] However, there was no real engagement: Woodward claimed the relationship was a front for Vidal, who was homosexual.[19] Woodward shared a house with Vidal in Los Angeles for a short time, and they remained friends.[18]

Woodward first met Newman in 1953. They later reconnected on the set of The Long, Hot Summer in 1957. Newman divorced his wife Jackie Witte, with whom he already had 3 children, and married Woodward on January 29, 1958, in Las Vegas. On March 28 of the same year, Woodward won the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Three Faces of Eve. The couple remained married for 50 years until Newman's death from lung cancer on September 26, 2008.[20] Woodward has said "He's very good looking and very sexy and all of those things, but all of that goes out the window and what is finally left is, if you can make somebody laugh... And he sure does keep me laughing." Newman has attributed their relationship success to "some combination of lust and respect and patience. And determination."[21]

Woodward's Hollywood Walk of Fame star

Woodward and Newman have three daughters: Elinor Teresa "Nell" (1959), Melissa Stewart (1961), and Claire Olivia "Clea" (1965). In 2012 Clea started running the nonprofit Hole-in-the-Wall that was started by her parents. [22]

Woodward and Newman also acted as mentors to Allison Janney. They met her while she was a freshman at Kenyon College and she was cast in a play that Newman directed.[23]

In 1988, Newman and Woodward established the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, a nonprofit residential summer camp, and year-round center named after the Wyoming mountain hideaway of the outlaws in Newman's film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The camp, located in Ashford, Connecticut provides services free of charge to 20,000 children and their families coping with cancer as well as other serious illnesses and conditions.[24]

In 1990, after working toward her bachelor's degree for more than 10 years, Woodward graduated from Sarah Lawrence College at the same time as her daughter Clea.[3] Newman delivered the commencement address, during which he said he dreamed that a woman had asked, "How dare you accept this invitation to give the commencement address when you are merely hanging on to the coattails of the accomplishments of your wife?"[25]

Woodward, widowed since 2008, makes her home in Westport, Connecticut, where she and Newman raised their daughters. Woodward and Newman were one of the first "Hollywood star" power couples that decided to raise their children outside California.

In 1958, Woodward won the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Three Faces of Eve.[3] In 1960, she won the Silver Shell for Best Actress at the San Sebastián International Film Festival for her work on The Fugitive Kind .[26] She was nominated for Best Actress in 1969 for Rachel, Rachel; in 1974 for Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams; and in 1991 for Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. She was named Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974 for her performance in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.

Woodward won two Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Mini-Series or TV Movie: for See How She Runs (1978), as a divorced teacher who trains for a marathon; and in Do You Remember Love? (1985), as a professor who begins to suffer from Alzheimer's disease. She has been nominated an additional five times for her roles on television.

A popular (but untrue) bit of Hollywood lore is that Woodward was the first celebrity to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In fact, the original 1,550 stars were created and installed as a unit in 1960; no one star was officially "first".[27] The first star actually completed was director Stanley Kramer's.[28] The origin of this legend is not known with certainty, but according to Johnny Grant, the long-time Honorary Mayor of Hollywood, Woodward was the first celebrity to agree to pose with her star for photographers, and therefore was singled out in the collective public imagination as the first awardee.[29]

In 1994, Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman were jointly presented the Award for Outstanding Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards for Public Service.[30]

• Morella, Joe; Epstein, Edward Z. (1988). Paul and Joanne: A Biography of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. New York: Delacorte Press. ISBN 978-0-440-50004-9. OCLC 18016049.
• Netter, Susan (1989). Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. London, England: Piatkus. ISBN 978-0-86188-869-6. OCLC 19778734.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Joanne Woodward.

• Joanne Woodward at IMDb
• Joanne Woodward at AllMovie
• Joanne Woodward at the Internet Broadway Database
• Joanne Woodward at Internet Off-Broadway Database