Joanne Woodward

Joanne Woodward (born February 27, 1930, Thomasville, Georgia, U.S.) is an American actress best known for her role in The Three Faces of Eve (1957) and for her 50-year marriage to actor Paul Newman. Woodward, who was naturally beautiful and poised, is highly respected and much lauded for her convincing portrayals in film, on television, and onstage. Her early spirited and strong roles distinguished her from others cast in the glamorous, helpless roles for women that were a trademark of 1950s Hollywood.

As a child, Woodward acted in local theatre productions in Greenville, South Carolina. After majoring in drama for two years at Louisiana State University, Woodward went home to Greenville and joined the Greenville Little Theatre, where she won her first acting award—for her performance as Laura Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. She eventually moved to New York City to test her skills. She studied at The Actors Studio and the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. She landed an understudy role in William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Picnic (1953–54) and, while working on the production, met Newman, a fellow cast member, then making his Broadway debut.

Throughout the 1950s Woodward appeared in numerous television programs. She got her first major film role in 1955 as the unkempt and spunky teenager Lissy in the western Count Three and Pray. The following year she appeared in the crime thriller A Kiss Before Dying opposite Robert Wagner. In 1957 she starred as a young Georgia housewife suffering from multiple personality disorder (now called dissociative identity disorder) in Nunnally Johnson’s The Three Faces of Eve. Her performance as three distinct personalities—Eve White, Eve Black, and Jane—in one person earned her an Academy Award for best actress.

Britannica Quiz

Oscar-Worthy Movie Trivia

Woodward and Newman costarred in The Long, Hot Summer, based on two stories and a novel by William Faulkner. Released in 1958, it was the first of their many on-screen collaborations, and they married later that year. Woodward went on to star in a string of successful films, including (opposite Newman) Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys! (1958), From the Terrace (1960), and Paris Blues (1961) and (opposite Marlon Brando) Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind (1960). After a two-year hiatus to care for her two young daughters, Woodward returned to Hollywood in 1963, but she did not have another success until Rachel, Rachel (1968), which was Newman’s directorial debut. Woodward’s performance as a 35-year-old unmarried schoolteacher earned her a New York Film Critics Circle best actress award and an Academy Award nomination for best actress. She earned two more nominations for best actress in a leading role, the first for her work in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973), in which she played a depressed housewife who suffers a midlife crisis when her mother dies. The second nomination came later, for her role in Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990), a film set in the 1930s that focuses on the relationship between Walter and India Bridge (Newman and Woodward), a wealthy Midwestern American couple who struggle to keep pace with their grown children and the changing world. Woodward also won praise for her performance as a vulgar alcoholic mother in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972), again under Newman’s direction.

In the late 1970s Woodward took on numerous roles in made-for-television movies, including the miniseries Sybil (1976), in which she played the doctor who treats a woman with multiple personalities played by Sally Field—a particularly apt role for Woodward considering her own film history. In 1978 she won an Emmy for her role as Betty Quinn in See How She Runs, the story of a divorced 40-year-old schoolteacher who changes the course of her life when she chooses to run the Boston Marathon. Woodward continued acting for television, appearing in about a dozen more movies over the next two decades. In 1979 she made her directorial debut, with an episode in the series Family (1976–80). She also directed “Come Along with Me” (1982), an episode of the television anthology series American Playhouse that was based on the story of that name by Shirley Jackson, but thereafter for the screen she stuck to acting.

Woodward won a second Emmy Award for her portrayal of a woman suffering from Alzheimer disease in the TV movie Do You Remember Love (1985). Husband and wife teamed up again when Newman directed Woodward as Amanda Wingfield in a screen adaptation of The Glass Menagerie (1987) and again when they costarred in Mr. & Mrs. Bridge. In 1993 she appeared as the mother of Tom Hanks’s character in the Academy Award-winning movie Philadelphia, and that same year she was the narrator of Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, based on Edith Wharton’s novel of the same name. Woodward’s last collaboration with her husband before he died, in 2008, was in the cable television miniseries Empire Falls (2005), based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book of that name by Richard Russo. Though Woodward and Newman were considered Hollywood nobility, their lifestyle was by no means typical. Woodward in particular eschewed the typical trappings of stardom. They kept their private lives private, opting to live quietly and raise their family out of the limelight in Westport, Connecticut, and managed to make their marriage last half a century.

While continuing to act—more onstage than on-screen—Woodward spent her later years working with her husband on philanthropic causes, including their charity-focused Newman’s Own Foundation and, for children with life-threatening illnesses, the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. In 2000 she became a supporter of the Westport Country Playhouse in Westport, Connecticut, and from 2001 to 2005 she also served as its artistic director. In addition, she directed and acted in select productions at the playhouse.

Are you a student?

Get a special academic rate on Britannica Premium.

Subscribe