Joanne Woodward

Joanne Woodward Bio

Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward (born February 27, 1930) is an American retired actress whose career spanned more than six decades across film, television, and stage. She earned lasting critical respect for portraying complex women with nuance, intelligence, and emotional depth, most famously in the role that brought her an Academy Award. Her accolades include an Academy Award, three Primetime Emmy Awards, a British Academy Film Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award, and she is recognized as the oldest living winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress.

Woodward is widely known for her performance in the 1957 drama The Three Faces of Eve and for her long professional and personal partnership with actor and director Paul Newman. The two married in 1958 and collaborated on numerous films and stage productions over the following five decades, becoming one of the most celebrated couples in American cinema.

Early Life and Background

Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward was born on February 27, 1930, in Thomasville, Georgia, the daughter of Elinor Trimmier Woodward and Wade Woodward Sr. Her middle names, Gignilliat Trimmier, are of Huguenot origin. Her mother, an avid film fan, inspired her early love of acting, and she was named after the screen star Joan Crawford. She has an older brother, Wade Jr.

As a child, Woodward moved with her family several times across the South, including stints in Blakely and Thomaston, before settling in Marietta, Georgia, where she attended Marietta High School. She has remained a supporter of the school and the city’s Strand Theater. After her parents divorced, the family relocated to Greenville, South Carolina, where she graduated from Greenville High School and performed at the local Little Theater, an early sign of the stage career to come.

A memorable childhood moment foreshadowed her future when, at the age of nine, she attended the Atlanta premiere of Gone with the Wind and sat on the lap of Laurence Olivier during a parade of stars. Decades later, while rehearsing a 1977 television production of Come Back, Little Sheba, she reminded Olivier of the encounter, and he said he remembered it as well.

Path to Celebrity Actress

Woodward studied drama at Louisiana State University, where she became an initiate of the Chi Omega sorority, then headed to New York City to pursue a stage career. In New York, she trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre under the renowned teacher Sanford Meisner and continued her studies at the Actors Studio, the same workshop that had nurtured many of the leading actors of her generation.

Her first television appearance came in 1952 on the anthology series Robert Montgomery Presents, in an episode titled Penny. The following year, she became an understudy for the William Inge drama Picnic on Broadway, where she met fellow cast member Paul Newman, who was still married to his first wife at the time.

Woodward built a steady résumé of early television work on programs such as Tales of Tomorrow, Goodyear Playhouse, The Web, The Ford Television Theatre, Kraft Theatre, and Studio One in Hollywood. In 1955, she made her film debut in the post-Civil War Western Count Three and Pray, in which she was billed second as a strong-willed orphan, and in January 1956 she was signed to a long-term contract by 20th Century Fox.

Joanne Woodward Career

Early Career (1950–1956)

During the early 1950s, Woodward worked steadily in live television drama and on the New York stage, taking on supporting and understudy roles while continuing her training. Her appearance in the 1953 Broadway production of Picnic introduced her to Paul Newman and cemented her commitment to a professional acting career.

Her first leading film role came in the 1955 Western Count Three and Pray, followed by the thriller A Kiss Before Dying (1956), in which she starred as an heiress pursued by a scheming Robert Wagner. She also returned to Broadway in 1956 to star in the short-lived drama The Lovers, a play that was later adapted into the 1965 film The War Lord. These early projects established her as a versatile young actress comfortable in both film and stage work.

Breakthrough (1957–1968)

Woodward’s career transformed with her performance in The Three Faces of Eve (1957), in which she played a woman with three distinct personalities. She gave each character a unique voice and physicality, and the role earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress. Notably, she wore a dress she had sewn herself to the ceremony, the only Best Actress winner to date to do so.

Fox responded to her newfound stardom by giving her top billing in No Down Payment (1957), directed by Martin Ritt, and in the William Faulkner adaptation The Sound and the Fury (1959), co-starring Yul Brynner. She worked with Sidney Lumet alongside Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani in The Fugitive Kind (1960), and reunited with Newman for the popular romantic drama From the Terrace (1960), followed by Paris Blues (1961) with director Martin Ritt.

In 1968, Newman produced and directed Rachel, Rachel, in which Woodward starred as a lonely schoolteacher hoping for love. The performance earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress and a Golden Globe Award, marking her successful transition from studio lead to mature dramatic actress.

Notable Works and Milestones

Beyond The Three Faces of Eve and Rachel, Rachel, Woodward’s signature films include From the Terrace (1960), The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972), Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973), and Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990). Her performance as a single mother in the 1972 Newman-directed drama won her the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival. For Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, she received her fourth Academy Award nomination for Best Actress and was named Best Actress by the New York Film Critics Circle.

Joanne Woodward Award Nominations

Joanne Woodward received multiple Academy Award nominations for Best Actress across her career, beginning with her win for The Three Faces of Eve (1957). She was later nominated for Rachel, Rachel (1968), Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973), and Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990). She also earned a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or a Movie for the 1993 drama Blind Spot, in which she also served as co-producer.

Joanne Woodward Awards Won

Woodward’s awards include the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Three Faces of Eve (1957), the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival for The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972), and the Silver Shell for Best Actress at the San Sebastián International Film Festival for The Fugitive Kind (1960). She also won two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or a Movie for See How She Runs (1978) and Do You Remember Love (1985), and a third Primetime Emmy Award as a producer for the documentary Broadway’s dreamers: The Legacy of the Group Theater (1990). In 1992, she and Paul Newman were jointly honored with the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement in the arts.

Joanne Woodward Family

Joanne Woodward was the daughter of Wade Woodward Sr. and Elinor Trimmier Woodward and the sister of Wade Woodward Jr. She married actor Paul Newman on January 29, 1958, in Las Vegas, and the couple remained together for fifty years until his death from lung cancer on September 26, 2008. Together they had three daughters: Elinor Teresa Nell Newman (born 1959), Melissa Stewart Newman (born 1961), and Claire Olivia Clea Newman (born 1965). In 1988, Woodward and Newman founded the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Ashford, Connecticut, a nonprofit residential summer camp serving children coping with cancer and other serious illnesses, which their daughter Clea now leads through the SeriousFun Children’s Network.

Personal Life

Woodward was reportedly engaged to author Gore Vidal before her marriage, though she later said she had served as a beard for Vidal, who was gay, and the two remained friends. She and Newman lived for many years in Westport, Connecticut, where they raised their daughters. Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2007, she retreated from public life and eventually relocated to Santa Monica, California, to be near her daughters. Her final public appearance was in 2013, and in 2022 she and Newman were the subject of the six-part HBO Max documentary The Last Movie Stars, directed by Ethan Hawke.