Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward affair and marriage | Films | Entertainment

Looking back nostalgically, we see movie legends Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward as a wonderful example of 50 years of cosy love and marriage (and remarkable philanthropy). But there’s a reason he was a major sex symbol far spicier than his famous sauces.

1958 film The Long Hot Summer is on BBC2 today. It was where their love finally proved impossible to resist, after torrid years of affairs and separations, while both were often in other relationships.

Even the trailer starts with a sizzling snog and the pair raised temperatures on and off-screen long after the film shoot wrapped and they built a home and family together – with plenty of time set aside for fun in a special room.

Newman was actually married to Jackie Witte with two children, Scott and Susan, when he met Woodward in the 1953 play Picnic. Their connection was combustible from the start.

In his autobiography, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, he wrote: “Joanne and I left a trail of lust all over the place. Hotels and motels and public parks and bathrooms and swimming pools and beaches and rumble seats and Hertz rental cars.

“I don’t know that Joanne and I sat around questioning our morals. There was passion in what we had. Something had happened to us and we had no idea where it was going. One day I’d determine to commit to her, and the next day, faced with having to do it, I’d find I couldn’t bring myself to break away from Jackie.”

Hollywood also came calling and in 1954 Newman made his first film, The Silver Chalice, which he admits was “the worst movie produced in the Fifties.” The affair had continued throughout but was increasingly unstable and traumatic for both of them.

He wrote: “When I left Hollywood after Silver Chalice wrapped, Joanne (who’d also been working there) and I had this terrible fight. It was over, all finished between us. We decided we’d never see each other again. It was a miserable situation for Joanne; she was a backstreet wife and I wouldn’t get a divorce…

“After I left California, Joanne and I didn’t communicate for what must have been months.” But fate had other ideas.

They bumped into each other in New York and Newman recalled: “We both just stood there, looking at each other, and it was on again And then it was off again. There were more separations, break-ups, lots of times we were not together. Terrible fights.

“Yes, we did want all the movie-star sh** and the lust and the scuttling around – I know we said we didn’t, but that was part of the allure. Because it was naughty and somewhere, somewhere, there was sacrifice involved.”

He confessed that “there was also the most incredible, unforgivable brutality” because “there was no signal given to Jackie, no chance for her to regroup.”

Eventually, his marriage collapsed beyond repair in the mid-1950s and the divorce was finalised in 1957.

That year, Newman and Woodward worked together on The Long, Hot Summer and he wrote: “For the first time, Joanne and I could do what we longed for years to do in public, as well as put on the screen what had already been discovered between us.

“There was a glue that held us together then, and through the rest of our life together. And that glue was this: anything seemed possible. The good, the bad and the wonderful. With all other people, some things were possible, but not everything. For us, the promise of everything was there from the beginning.

Not forgetting, of course, that “making that movie was a lusty time together for us.”

After a swift Las Vegas wedding and honeymoon in London, the pair set up home in Beverly Hills, where Woodward created a special room just for the two of them.

Newman wrote: “Joanne stepped outside wearing a bandana and a paint-covered frock; I asked her what was up. She led me inside to a room off the master bedroom… Everything had been replaced by some thrift-shop double bed with a new Sealy mattress; next to it was a champagne stand, complete with an ice bucket in some raucous colour. Joanne had been in the middle of painting the room.

“‘I call it the F*** Hut,”’she said, proudly. It was wonderful and had been done with such affection and delight. Even if my kids came over, we’d go in the F*** Hut several nights a week and just be intimate, noisy, and ribald.”

The pair had three children, Elinor, Melissa and Claire and built a devoted and close-knit family life. Their extraordinary physical bond was matched by the way their completely different personalities meshed.

Newman said: “Joanne and I still drive each other crazy in different ways… She was always so vulnerable, and she seemed to have no ego, and yet there is a towering ego there. We had that in common. One moment she would be filled with a sense of worth and the next it would simply shatter, so when she would go off I would recognise it and hold her blameless. I would understand. Whatever it is, it’s wonderfully equal.”

They remained completely devoted and faithful to each other, with Newman famously telling Playboy magazine: “I have steak at home; why go out for hamburger?”

The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man by Paul Newman is out now