An unlikely early 1970s cult star, actor Barry Newman managed it with one of his first movies, as Kowalski, the weary ex-cop loaded up on drugs, who takes it on himself to drive from Denver to San Francisco in 15 hours pursued by the police in the counterculture road flick Point limite zéro (1971). The adventures of this rebel without a cause certainly shows its age nowadays, but back then it had the requisite existential feel and most certainly was a symbolic sign of the times a la Peter Fonda's Easy Rider (1969). Newman showed himself off as the new kind of brooding anti-hero that the average-looking Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino were making popular at the time. Newman didn't hit the kind of heights that Hoffman and Pacino achieved, but has continued on solidly for three decades in tough-talking supports. Barry was born in 1938 in Boston, to an Austrian Jewish father and a Russian Jewish mother. He graduated from Brandeis University with a degree in anthropology, but turned to acting and the New York scene after "crashing" a class at the Actor's Studio. Throughout the 1960s, he appeared on stage in such plays as "Night Life", "The Mouse Trap" and "What Makes Sammy Run?" A couple of minor films came his way, including Pretty Boy Floyd (1960). It was his hard-hitting role in Au-delà de la sentence (1970) that finally opened the doors needed to get ahead and then Point limite zéro (1971). His cocky, self-assured presence made him even sexier than he appeared. He carried this attitude into his own TV series Petrocelli (1974), in the 1970s, playing a hot-shot attorney but, following the show's demise, his career flattened out. An obvious talent, Newman's later films such as Amy (1981), Daylight (1996) and L'Anglais (1999) have managed to keep him in the public eye.
