The first ever Biography of Robert Newton...
"He was never an actor, he was always like that, a little devil...!" The man laughs; laughter in his voice and in his eyes, glad at the rich memory. Lamorna, Cornwall, June 2005.
From an idyll Cornish childhood to a desperate death amidst the Hollywood elite. Cowboy, beach-bum, loaded and flat broke. He survived the bloodiest naval arena in the second world war; married four times he failed as a husband and a father. He starred in dozens of films, dozens of plays. Newton was more than an actor, yet he is the quintessential pirate, Disney's 'Long John Silver', is the brutal 'Bill Sykes' in Oliver Twist. Farmer, tax exile, he ran his own theatre and loved Rolls Royces. In America and Australia. Generous, gregarious, needful, lost, he swept through life and left people reeling in his wake; Olivier, Burton, Coward, Wayne. Laughing, infected with his joyous lust for life. He hid discretion under a coat of folly, but he was the man who would tell you, tell everybody, loudly, that the Emperor was naked...