Newman personified cool on, off screen

Paul Newman, one of the last of the great 20th-century movie stars, died of cancer Friday at his home in Westport, Conn. He was 83.

If Marlon Brando and James Dean defined the defiant American male as a sullen rebel, Paul Newman recreated him as a likable renegade, a strikingly handsome figure of animal high spirits and blue-eyed candor whose magnetism was almost impossible to resist, whether the character was Hud, Cool Hand Luke or Butch Cassidy.

He acted in more than 65 movies over more than 50 years, drawing on physical grace, unassuming intelligence and good humor.

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 old age even as he redefined himself as more than a star. He raced cars, opened summer camps for ailing children and became a nonprofit 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," but 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."

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 confidence man determined to marry a Southern belle in an adaptation of "The Long, Hot Summer."

Perfecting the imperfect

Few major American stars have chosen to play so many imperfect men.

As Hud Bannon in "Hud" (1963), Newman was a heel on the Texas range who wanted the good life and was willing to sell diseased cattle to get it. The character was intended to make the audience feel "loathing and disgust," Newman once said. Instead, he said, "we created a folk hero."

As the self-destructive convict in "Cool Hand Luke" (1967), Newman was too rebellious to be broken by a brutal prison system. As Butch Cassidy in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969) he was the most amiable and antic of bank robbers, memorably paired with Robert Redford. And in "The Hustler" (1961), he was the small-time pool shark Fast Eddie, a role he recreated 25 years later in "The Color of Money" (1986).

That performance brought Newman his sole Academy Award, for best actor, after he had been nominated for that prize six times. In all, he received eight Oscar nominations for best actor and one for best supporting actor, in "Road to Perdition." "Rachel, Rachel," which he directed, was nominated for best picture.

Beyond Hollywood

But the movies and the occasional stage role were never enough for him. He became a successful race-car driver, even competing at Daytona in 1995 as a 70th birthday present to himself. He won his class.

In the 1970s and '80s, his love of racing brought him regularly to Brainerd International Raceway -- the site of his first professional auto-racing victory, Aug. 8, 1982. The oldest driver in the field, he took the lead in the first lap of a 99-mile Trans-Am race and never looked back.

"Wait till my old lady hears about this," Newman cracked afterward. "It was so unexpected that I can't deal with it right now. About 40 Budweisers and I'll deal with it coherently."

John Jeppesen, a Minnesota-raised writer and photographer who now is a NASCAR consultant, met Newman at the Brainerd speedway. "He was hounded by all the race fans at the track," Jeppesen said. "If you look where the crowd of 500 people were standing, you knew he was nearby."

In 1982, as a lark, he decided to sell a salad dressing he had created and bottled for friends at Christmas. Thus was born Newman's Own. More than 25 years later the brand has expanded to include all sorts of food, even wine. (His daughter Nell Newman runs the company's organic arm.) All its profits, of more than $200 million, have been donated to charity.

Much of the money was used to create camps that provide free summer recreation for children with serious illnesses.

Articles have suggested that Newman's film choices were influenced by his troubled relationship with his father and Newman's estrangement from his son, Scott, a budding actor who died in 1978 of an overdose of alcohol and Valium. His father's monument to him was the Scott Newman Center, created to publicize the dangers of drugs and alcohol. It is headed by Susan Newman, the oldest of his five daughters.

Enduring marriage

Newman's three younger daughters are from his 50-year second marriage, to actress Joanne Woodward. Newman and Woodward both 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 10 movies.

In an industry in which long marriages might be defined as those that last beyond the first year and the first infidelity, Newman and Woodward's was striking for its endurance. But they admitted that it was often turbulent. She loved opera and ballet. He liked playing practical jokes and racing cars. But as Newman told Playboy magazine, in an often-repeated quotation about marital fidelity, "I have steak at home; why go out for hamburger?"