I found this sad. Paul ,deserve the label icon. He was a brilliant man, not just for his acting but in his personal life. He brought a new approach to charity fundraising, mocked at first but now copied by many. I and I am sure everyone of us on this board wish him a long and happy retirement, but we'll miss him.
Here's a news article:-
Paul Newman Exits Stage Right
by Natalie Finn
From here on out, Paul Newman will just be known as the salad dressing guy.
The Oscar-winning actor, who turned 82 in January, said during an interview on Good Morning America Thursday that, after 50 years in front of the camera, he's calling it a career.
"I'm not able to work anymore as an actor at the level I would want to," Newman, who won the Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer in 1957, told GMA. "You start to lose your memory, your confidence, your invention. So that's pretty much a closed book for me…I've been doing it for 50 years. That's enough."
While the announcement should come as a disappointment for Newman fans everywhere, the iconic performer from Shaker Heights, Ohio, is going out on top, having just picked up an Emmy, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award last year for his supporting role as Ed Harris' eccentric coot of a father in the HBO miniseries Empire Falls.
And it sure didn't look as if Newman had lost much of his va-va-va-voom when he hopped into a go-kart and trounced Jay Leno in a mini drag race through NBC Studios last year—and triumphed in the rematch, as well.
But the blue-eyed '60s (and '70s and '80s)-era sex symbol isn't packing his celebrity in for good, but rather just redirecting his energies elsewhere.
Newman says that he's planning to focus on the Dressing Room, the organic restaurant he opened in Westport, Connecticut, to help support local and regional farmers by utilizing homegrown ingredients and sponsoring a weekly farmers market, and on his Hole in the Wall Gang no-fee camps for children with life-threatening illnesses.
The race car enthusiast, entrepreneur and philanthropist is also the founder of the Newman's Own brand of salad dressings, pasta sauces, salsas and popcorn, which has raised more than $200 million for charity—including the seed money to start Hole in the Wall Gang—since its inception.
Newman, star of such classic silver-screen fare as Cool Hand Luke, Hud, The Hustler, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Long Hot Summer, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, Exodus, Absence of Malice and The Verdict, is a 10-time Academy Award nominee.
A year after he received an honorary lifetime achievement award in 1986, he finally pocketed a Best Actor win for The Color of Money, in which he reprised his Hustler role as Fast Eddie Felson.
He has also been nominated twice since, for Best Actor for Nobody's Fool in 1995 and for his supporting turn in 2002's Road to Perdition, and was given the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1994.
Newman has been husband to fellow Oscar winner Joanne Woodward, with whom he has three daughters, for 49 years. The actor also had three children from a previous marriage, but son Scott Newman passed away in 1978.
