Paul Newman was already a famous actor when he starred as Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler, but the movie made him a bona fide Hollywood star after its premiere on September 25, 1961.
The sports drama starring Newman, then 36 years old, and Jackie Gleason as Minnesota Fats went on to earn nine Academy Award nominations, but Newman did not win for Best Actor.
It actually took 25 years for the release of its sequel, The Color of Money, directed by Martin Scorsese and co-starring Tom Cruise, for Newman to reprise his character of Fast Eddie and win his first and only Oscar.
Now, 65 years later, The Hustler remains one of Hollywood’s most acclaimed movies.
Before his death in 2008 at the age of 83, Newman spoke about his role as the pool shark.
“It was one of those movies when you work every day and could hardly wait to get to work,” he said, “because you knew that it was so good that nobody was going to be able to louse it up.”
At the time he was cast, Newman had never even held a pool cue, unlike his co-star Gleason, who was already a skilled pool player in real life. World pocket billiards champion Willie Mosconi also mentored Newman, and he reportedly replaced his dining room with a pool table.
At the 1987 Academy Awards, where Newman won his first Oscar for The Color of Money after seven nominations — including his iconic roles in Cool Hand Luke and Hud — he wasn’t even in attendance.
“It’s been a long time,” he said in a 1987 interview after the ceremony. “It’s like chasing a beautiful woman for 80 years, and then it’s ‘well, here I am.’ And you say, ‘so…now what’?”
The win came three decades after his wife Joanne Woodward’s own statue, prompting Newman to add, “Every time we get into an argument about cooking or laundering shirts, she shakes her Oscar at me, and I’m dead in the water. It would be a great equalizer now after 33 years. Sickening…”
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