Film legend Paul Newman passed away on Friday. The 83-year-old actor voiced the role of Doc Hudson in Disney/Pixar’s Cars before succumbing to cancer at his home near Westport, Connecticut. He reprised the role of the talking 1951 Hudson Hornet for the Cars video game and the short film Mater and the Ghostlight.
Newman was best known for his roles in such screen classics as The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973). Nominated eight times for the Best Actor Oscar, he finally won for the role pool shark Fast Eddie Felson in 1986’s The Color of Money, a sequel to The Hustler. He garnered two more nominations for his work in Nobody’s Fool(1999) and Road to Perdition (2002).
His good looks and captivating blue eyes helped make Newman a movie star, but he would finish his screen career off screen as the voice of an animated character. One of his contemporaries, celluloid icon Marlon Brando, also capped a long, distinguished career with a toon role. He completed voice work for an independent animated feature titled Big Bug Man shortly before dying of lung failure at the age of 80 in 2004. Written by former Simpsons scribe Bob Bendetson, the film from Studio-Free Studios was originally slated for release in the spring of 2006, but has yet to surface.
The release of Cars 2 was recently moved up a year to the summer of 2011. There’s no word on whether or not the Doc Hudson character will be featured. In the first film, Doc served as a wise mentor to hero Lightning McQueen, voiced by Owen Wilson.
