THE CHAMP Paul Newman in rehearsal as the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, photographed on May 28, 2002, at the Westport Country Playhouse in Westport, Connecticut, where his wife, Joanne Woodward, is the artistic director.

My first television play, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's The Battler, was to star James Dean, but shortly before the start of rehearsals in 1955, Dean was killed in a car crash. Our director, Arthur Penn, believed that Paul Newman, a young man from the Actors Studio who had been cast in a secondary role, could play the punch-drunk former welterweight champion. Newman's first rehearsal was far off the mark, but he checked into a fleabag hotel adjacent to a boxing gym in downtown Los Angeles and shared a room with an addled ex-boxer; soon, the slurred speech and wobbly gait of that pathetic prizefighter became part of Newman's persona for the role. As a result of his thrilling performance, Newman was cast in his first major film, Somebody Up There Likes Me, playing middleweight champ Rocky Graziano. He has in 54 films since then—with his wife, Oscar Joanne Woodward, in 11 of them—directed six and received two Academy Awards, for lifetime achievement in 1985 and for best actor in The of Money in 1986. To produce an authentic Iris brogue for Road to Perdition—out this month, directed by Sam Mendes and co-starring Tom Hanks-Newman used his old trick. He enlisted the assistance of Frank McCourt, the author of Angela's Ashes, and absorbed his accent. On November 5, Paul will recreate his original Battler role when The World of Nick Adams is performed at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, with proceeds going to the Hole in the Wall Gang camps, which Newman and I started in 1986 for children suffering from cancer and other life-threatening diseases.