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 a physical grace, unassuming intelligence
and good humor 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 even as he redefined himself
as more than Hollywood 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.
Mr. 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.”
Mr. Dean had been killed in a car crash
before the screenplay was finished.
It was a rapid rise for Mr. Newman,
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.”
Mr. Newman’s filmography was a cavalcade of flawed heroes
and winning antiheroes stretching over decades.
In 1958 he was a drifting confidence 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 onscreen role
in a major theatrical release.
(He supplied the voice of the veteran race car Doc
in the Pixar animated film “Cars” in 2006.)
Few major American stars have chosen to play so many imperfect men.
As Hud Bannon in “Hud” (1963)
Mr. 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,” Mr. Newman told a reporter.
Instead, he said, “we created a folk hero.”
As the self-destructive convict in “Cool Hand Luke”
(1967) Mr. 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,
now as a well-heeled middle-aged liquor salesman,
in “The Color of Money” (1986).
That performance, alongside Tom Cruise, brought
Mr. 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.
“When a role is right for him, he’s peerless,”
the film critic Pauline Kael wrote in 1977.
“Newman is most comfortable in a role
when it isn’t scaled heroically; even when he plays a bastard,
he’s not a big bastard — only a callow,
selfish one, like Hud. He can play what he’s not — a dumb lout.
But you don’t believe it when he plays someone perverse or vicious,
and the older he gets and the better you know him,
the less you believe it. His likableness is infectious;
nobody should ever be asked not to like Paul Newman.”
But the movies and the occasional stage role were
never enough for him. He became a successful racecar driver,
winning several Sports Car Club of America national driving titles.
He even competed at Daytona in 1995
as a 70th birthday present to himself.
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. More than 25 years later the brand has expanded to include,
among other foods, lemonade, popcorn, spaghetti sauce,
pretzels, organic Fig Newmans and wine.
(His daughter Nell Newman runs the company’s organic arm.)
All its profits, of more than $200 million,
have been donated to charity, the company says.
Much of the money was used to create a string of Hole
in the Wall Gang Camps, named for the outlaw gang
in “Butch Cassidy.” The camps provide free summer recreation
for children with cancer and other serious illnesses.
Mr. Newman was actively involved in the project,
even choosing cowboy hats as gear so that children
who had lost their hair because of chemotherapy could disguise their baldness.
Several years before the establishment of Newman’s Own,
on Nov. 28, 1978, Scott Newman,
the oldest of Mr. 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 Center,
created to publicize the dangers of drugs and alcohol.
It is headed by Susan Newman, the oldest of his five daughters.
Mr. Newman’s three younger daughters
are the children of his 50-year second marriage,
to the actress Joanne Woodward.
Mr. Newman and Ms. 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, including “From the Terrace” (1960),
based on a John O’Hara novel about a driven executive
and his unfaithful wife; “Harry & Son” (1984),
which Mr. Newman also directed, produced and helped write;
and “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge” (1990),
James Ivory’s version of a pair of Evan S. Connell novels,
in which Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward played
a conservative Midwestern couple coping with life’s changes.
When good roles for Ms. Woodward dwindled,
Mr. Newman produced and directed “Rachel, Rachel” for her in 1968.
Nominated for the best-picture Oscar, the film,
a delicate story of a spinster schoolteacher tentatively hoping for love,
brought Ms. Woodward her second of four best-actress Oscar nominations.
(She won the award on her first nomination,
for the 1957 film “The Three Faces of Eve,”
and was nominated again for her roles in “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge”
and the 1973 movie “Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams.”)
Mr. Newman also directed his wife
in “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” (1972),
“The Glass Menagerie” (1987) and the television movie “The Shadow Box” (1980).
As a director his most ambitious film was “Sometimes a Great Notion” (1971),
based on the Ken Kesey novel.
In an industry in which long marriages might be defined
as those that last beyond the first year and the first infidelity,
Mr. Newman and Ms. 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 Mr. Newman told Playboy magazine,
in an often-repeated quotation about marital fidelity,
“I have steak at home; why go out for hamburger?”
Beginnings in Cleveland