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Most people in any walk of life are going to experience a crisis of confidence at least once during their careers. Paul Newman may have been one of Hollywood’s biggest stars and best actors, but he was still ready to abandon his livelihood and try something else after growing severely disenfranchised with his lot.

It’s a first-world problem to have when the actor was earning more money than most people could ever dream of, lending his natural charm and effervescent gravitas to critical darlings and box office smash hits alike, which wasn’t enough to keep his creative juices sufficiently satiated.

He had his extra-curricular activities, with Newman turning his love of motorsports into a secondary profession and launching the food company Newman’s Own and its associated charitable organisation, so it’s not as if he was spending his downtime between pictures sitting around and twiddling his thumbs.

And yet, the older he got, the more he wanted to test himself as a performer. Because he was so famous, though, he was aware that it was much easier said than done. “I picture my epitaph,” he mused to The New York Times in 1986. “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.”

By the end of the previous decades, he’d reached a crossroads. He was in his mid-50s, and his days of The Hustler, Hud, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Towering Inferno were behind him. It was time for a new chapter, and for a while, that chapter didn’t involve acting at all.

By his own admission, Newman contemplated “chucking it all and becoming a gentleman dairy farmer” until two films in quick succession rejuvenated him. The first was Sydney Pollack’s journalistic thriller Absence of Malice, and the second was Sidney Lumet’s legal drama The Verdict, which were released a year apart in December of 1981 and 1982, and both got him on the Academy Awards shortlist for ‘Best Actor’.

The third and final feature that stopped Newman from walking away was the crowning achievement of his career. Scaling back his workload, the only movie he made in the next four years after The Verdict was Harry & Son, a passion project that he directed himself. What came next was Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money, which finally earned the eternal bridesmaid his first competitive Oscar at the eighth time of asking.

He was fully prepared to wash his hands of Hollywood altogether, only to refocus and prioritise the projects that would allow him to give his best work. Newman never wanted to be a movie star, and when he was in a position at an age where his good looks were no longer the biggest talking point that surrounded him, he used it as the springboard for a phenomenal second wind.