Paul Newman - Actor

IF MARLON Brando and James Dean defined the defiant American male as a sullen rebel, Paul Newman recreated him as a likeable renegade, a handsome figure of animal high spirits and blue-eyed candour whose magnetism was almost impossible to resist.

Born: 26 January, 1925, in Cleveland, Ohio. Died: 26 September, 2008, in Westport, Connecticut, aged 83.
He acted in more than 65 films over more than 50 years, drawing on a physical grace, unassuming intelligence and good humour that made it all seem effortless.

Yet he was also an ambitious, intellectual actor and a passionate student of his craft, and he achieved what most of his peers find impossible: remaining a major star into a craggy, charismatic old age. He also raced cars, opened summer camps for ailing children and became a non-profit entrepreneur with a line of foods that put his picture on supermarket shelves around the world.

Newman made his Hollywood debut in the 1954 costume film The Silver Chalice. Stardom arrived a year and a half later, when he inherited from James Dean the role of the boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me after Dean had been killed in a car crash before the screenplay was finished.

It was a rapid rise, but being taken seriously as an actor took longer. He was almost undone by his star power, his classic good looks and, most of all, his brilliant blue eyes. "I picture my epitaph," he once said. "Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown."

Newman's filmography was a cavalcade of flawed heroes and winning anti-heroes. In 1958 he was a drifting con man determined to marry a Southern belle in an adaptation of The Long, Hot Summer. In 1982, in The Verdict, he was a washed-up alcoholic lawyer who finds a chance to redeem himself in a medical malpractice case.

And in 2002, at 77, having lost none of his charm, he was affably deadly as Tom Hanks's gangster boss in Road to Perdition. It was his last major screen role, although he was the voice of veteran racing car Doc in the Pixar animated film Cars in 2006.

Few major American stars have chosen to play so many imperfect men, in a string of memorable films such as

Hud (1963);

Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), in which he was memorably paired with Robert Redford as the most amiable and antic of bank robbers. In The Hustler (1961) he was a small-time pool shark, Fast Eddie, a role he recreated 25 years later, now as a well-heeled middle-aged liquor salesman, in The Colour of Money (1986).

That performance, alongside Tom Cruise, brought Newman his sole Academy Award, for best actor, after he had been nominated six times.

But screen and occasional stage roles were never enough for him. He became a successful racing car driver, winning several Sports Car Club of America national driving titles, and in 1982, as a lark, he decided to sell a salad dressing he had created and bottled for friends at Christmas. Thus was born the Newman's Own brand, an enterprise he started with his friend A E Hotchner, the writer. All its profits, more than £100 million, have been donated to charity, much of it towards setting up summer camps for children with cancer.

Several years before the establishment of Newman's Own, on 28 November, 1978, Scott Newman, the eldest of Newman's six children and his only son, died at 28 of an overdose of alcohol and pills. His father's monument to him was the Scott Newman Centre, created to publicise the dangers of drugs and alcohol.

Newman had a 50-year marriage (his second) to the actress Joanne Woodward. The pair were cast – she as an understudy – in the Broadway play Picnic in 1953. Starting with The Long, Hot Summer in 1958, they co-starred in ten films.

The marriage, though enduring, was often turbulent, but, as Newman once told Playboy magazine, in an often-repeated quotation about fidelity: "I have steak at home; why go out for hamburger?"

Paul Leonard Newman was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His mother, Teresa, was a Roman Catholic who turned to Christian Science. His father, Arthur, who was Jewish, owned a thriving sporting goods store that enabled the family to settle in affluent Shaker Heights, where Paul and his older brother, Arthur, grew up.

In high school, besides playing football, he acted in school plays. After less than a year at Ohio University, he joined the Navy Air Corps as a pilot. When a test showed he was colour blind, he was made a radio operator.

After the war Newman entered Kenyon College in Ohio. He played football and acted in a dozen plays before graduating in 1949.

In May 1950 his father died, and Newman returned to Cleveland to run the sporting goods store. He brought with him a wife, Jacqueline Witte, an actress. But after 18 months Paul asked his brother to take over the business while he, his wife and their year-old son, Scott, headed for Yale University, where Newman intended to concentrate on directing.

He left Yale in summer 1952. But almost immediately was given a small role in Picnic. Soon he was playing the second male lead.

Newman and Ms Woodward were attracted to each other in rehearsals of Picnic. But he was a married man, and Ms Woodward has insisted they spent the next several years running away from each other.

In the early 1950s they both had many television roles.

Newman was also accepted as a student at the Actors Studio in New York.

Then Hollywood knocked. In 1954 Warner Brothers offered Newman $1,000 a week to star in The Silver Chalice as a Greek slave who creates the silver cup used at the Last Supper. Newman later said it was the worst movie ever made.

His antidote was to hurry back to stage and television roles.

By 1957 Newman and Woodward were discreetly living together in Hollywood; his wife, who had also borne him two daughters, had initially refused to give him a divorce. He later admitted his drinking was out of control during this period.

Newman and Woodward were married on 29 January, 1958, and went on to rear their three daughters far from Hollywood, in a farmhouse on 15 acres in Westport, Connecticut.

That same year Newman played Brick in the film version of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, earning his first Academy Award nomination, for best actor. In 1961, with The Hustler, he earned his second best-actor Oscar nomination. He had become more than a matinee idol.

Many of his meatier performances during the early 1960s came in films directed by Martin Ritt, including Hud (1963), which brought Newman a third Oscar nomination.

Among his other important films were Otto Preminger's Exodus (1960), Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain (1966) and Jack Smight's Harper (1966).

In 1968 – after he was cast as a racing car driver in Winning, Newman was sent to a racing school. In midlife, racing became his obsession. His first race came in 1972; his first professional victory in 1982. He was co-owner of the successful Newman/Haas Indy racing team.

Newman, a politically active liberal Democrat, was appointed by president Jimmy Carter to a United Nations General Assembly session on disarmament. He expressed pride at being on former president Richard Nixon's enemies list.

When Newman turned 50, he settled into a new career as a character actor, playing the title role in Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976); an unscrupulous hockey coach in George Roy Hill's Slap Shot (1977); and a disintegrating lawyer in Sidney Lumet's Verdict.

Most of his films were commercial hits, probably none more so than The Sting (1973), in which he teamed up with Redford again, with the pair playing a couple of con men, and The Towering Inferno (1974).

After his fifth best-actor Oscar nomination, in Sydney Pollack's Absence of Malice (1981), and his sixth a year later, for The Verdict, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1986 gave Newman the consolation prize of an honorary award.

His best-actor Oscar, for The Colour of Money, came the next year. In 2003 he was nominated as best supporting actor for Road to Perdition. And in 2006 he took home a Golden Globe and an Emmy for the mini-series Empire Falls.

Newman returned to Broadway for the last time in 2002, as stage manager in a lucrative revival of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. When the play was broadcast in 2003, he won an Emmy.

His last screen credit was as narrator of Bill Haney's documentary The Price of Sugar, released this year. By then he had all but announced he was through with acting.

But he remained fulfilled by his charitable work, saying it was his greatest legacy.

"We are such spendthrifts with our lives," Newman once told a reporter. "The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. In life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out."

Besides his wife, Newman is survived by his five daughters, two grandchildren and brother.