The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, a posthumous memoir by Paul Newman, is an odd duck of a book—welcome, but odd. It arrives on the heels of The Last Movie Stars, Ethan Hawke’s six-part, six-hour-plus documentary series released on HBO Max in July, which chronicled the marriage and often intertwined careers of Newman and Joanne Woodward. The series’s spine was pieced together like a stack of Legos from a series of interviews with the two actors and various friends, family members, and colleagues, which Newman had commissioned between 1986 and 1991—raw material for an autobiography he ultimately decided not to write.
His heirs changed his mind for him. But the new book is based on the same interviews, and frequently overlaps with the documentary. So is The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man merely a supplement to The Last Movie Stars? For readers who have watched the series, the book can’t help but suffer in comparison for not being able to include glorious clip after glorious clip of Newman in action across his lengthy filmography. That, after all, is why we care—with all due respect to his second and third careers as a race-car driver and a philanthropist.
