Paul Newman, 83, the Hollywood icon with the famous blue eyes | Philadelphia Inquirer

Paul Newman, 83, the Hollywood icon with the famous blue eyes and killer grin who seduced audiences with six decades worth of rebels, rascals and moody romancers, died yesterday after a battle with cancer.

He died in the farmhouse in Westport, Conn., where he lived with his wife Joanne Woodward, his costar in life and in 10 of his movies at his side, along with other family members.

Mr. Newman, who also pursued politics and race cars and his philanthropic foodstuffs company with a passion, was an actor who radiated such easygoing, wily charm that it was virtually impossible to dislike the characters he played, even when they were selfish heels, shallow pretty boys, con men or drunks - and they often were.

With a cool swagger and winkingly sardonic allure, Mr. Newman made an indelible impression on audiences in the 1950s and '60s, offering an assortment of iconic figures: Fast Eddie Felson, the pool shark of The Hustler; Chance Wayne, the self-deluded gigolo of Sweet Bird of Youth; Hud Bannon, the crude Texas cowpoke of Hud; Luke Jackson, the defiant chain-ganger of Cool Hand Luke, and Butch Cassidy, one of the rascally train-robbers - Robert Redford being the other - in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Of the generation of Marlon Brando and James Dean - and lumped in with them early on by the press and public - Mr. Newman was Method-trained and Broadway-schooled, moving from episodic television in the early 1950s to Hollywood, where his preternatural good looks and devilish smile won him a Warner Bros. contract and near-instant stardom.

He was nominated for 10 Academy Awards over the decades, winning once, in 1987, for The Color of Money, in which he revisited the role of Fast Eddie, the pool ace he had played 25 years earlier in The Hustler. Like Humphrey Bogart, Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart, Mr. Newman was - and is - a Hollywood immortal.

And like them, Newman never entirely shrugged off his own persona in the roles he played. He generated sexual heat, he brooded and beamed, he surprised with his dry humor and was, very often, riveting. But you never forgot that you were watching Newman. As the trailers to his early, essential movies said: Paul Newman is Hud, Paul Newman is Harper.

Jokingly exploiting his name and celebrity, Mr. Newman became a significant player in the world of philanthropy. In 1982, he launched Newman's Own, with the proceeds from its salsas and salad dressings, popcorn and pasta sauces generating more than $200 million for charity.

He and Woodward established the Hole in the Wall Gang Camps for terminally ill children, and, after the death of his son, Scott, from a drug and alcohol overdose in 1978, Mr. Newman founded a drug rehabilitation facility in his son's name in Los Angeles.

"Paul is vulnerable to the needs of people," his friend and Newman's Own business partner, the writer A.E. Hotchner, told Newsweek in 1995. "He's vulnerable to his own vulnerability. I think that recognition of vulnerability in a role, or in life, is what's given him his drive. It's the essential thing of his personality."

Private and publicity-shy, Mr. Newman was nonetheless active in politics and social causes. An early critic of the Vietnam War, Mr. Newman was a delegate to the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago (supporting Eugene McCarthy); campaigned in 1972 for George McGovern for president; and was appointed by President Jimmy Carter as his delegate to nuclear disarmament talks at the United Nations. In 1995, Mr. Newman bought a controlling interest in the liberal political journal The Nation, and occasionally contributed to its pages.

After starring in 1969's Indy 500 race-car picture Winning, Mr. Newman pursued the sport with obsessive zeal. He won his first national amateur championship in 1976, and in 1979, at age 54, finished second in the Le Mans 24-hour road race. In the '70s and '80s, he scheduled his movie jobs around his race calendar. He co-owned the Newman-Haas Indy Car team.

Mr. Newman's roster of artistic and commercial successes includes Tennessee Williams (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth), a clutch of famous "H" movies (Harper, Hombre, Hud, The Hustler), two snappy team-ups with Redford (Butch Cassidy, The Sting) and some mid- and late-life gems (The Verdict, Nobody's Fool).

Mr. Newman received the first of his nine Oscar nominations for acting in 1959, for his booze-soaked ex-jock Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. His others were for The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Absence of Malice (1981), The Verdict (1982), The Color of Money (1986), Nobody's Fool (1994), and Road to Perdition (2002). He also was nominated as producer of Rachel, Rachel, the 1968 drama starring Woodward. It was the first of five films he would direct.

Paul Leonard Newman was born on Jan. 26, 1925, in Cleveland, the second son of Arthur and Theresa Newman. Paul and his year-older brother, Arthur Jr., grew up in an 11-room house in the leafy suburb of Shaker Heights.

Mr. Newman was a small kid who went through the Shaker Heights schools without much sign of seriousness or intellect. He liked sports, and caught the acting bug early, making his stage debut at age 10, in St. George and the Dragon. He was St. George.

In 1943, after a brief stint at Ohio University in Athens - plenty of beer and bar fights - he joined the Navy, intent on becoming a pilot. But his partial color blindness (he couldn't distinguish red from green) nixed that. Instead, he became a radioman on bombers in the Pacific, seeing next to no combat.

After the war, in 1946, he enrolled at Kenyon College on the GI Bill, majoring in literature and theater. Mr. Newman graduated in 1949 and joined a summer stock company in Wisconsin (the Gentleman Caller in The Glass Menagerie was one of his first Williams roles), then a season with the Woodstock Players repertory near Chicago. He met and married Jacqueline Witte, a fellow Woodstock Player, and in 1950 they had a son, Scott. That same year, Arthur Newman died.

In 1982, Mr. Newman told Time magazine that losing his father before he could see his son's success had always hurt. "I think he always thought of me as pretty much a lightweight. He treated me like he was disappointed in me a lot of the time, and he had every right to be. It was one of the great agonies of my life that he could never know. . . . I desperately wanted to show him that somehow, somewhere along the line I could cut the mustard. And I never got a chance, never got a chance."

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