There are always more movie stars, but every now and then a really great one dies and it's as if a star has gone out in the firmament. A twinkling blue star. Paul Newman, famous for his blue-eyed stare, died yesterday from lung cancer. He was 83 and had been ill for several years but had finished his final course of chemotherapy in May. "It's absolutely amazing that I survived all the booze and smoking and the cars and the career," he once said of achieving old age, and there's no doubt that he felt he'd had a good run of it. After all, in the course of one lifetime, he managed to do an extraordinary number of things.
Perhaps best known to film fans as the eponymous Hustler who reappeared, reimagined, opposite Tom Cruise in The Colour Of Money, Newman was also the titular villain in Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, the nonconformist prisoner Cool Hand Luke, and the star of classics like Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, The Towering Inferno and The Sting. He also achieved success as a director, with films such as The Glass Menagerie, and he played piano on film soundtracks. Yet despite a passionate fan following, he always kept a cool head. "The first time I remember women reacting to me was when we were filming Hud in Texas," he recalled. "Women were literally trying to climb through the transoms at the motel where I stayed. At first, it's flattering to the ego. At first. Then you realize that they're mixing me up with the roles I play - characters created by writers who have nothing to do with who I am." Despite all the attention he married only twice and was still with actress Joanne Woodward at the time of his death.
Newman also made a name for himself as a political activist, devoting himself to liberal causes. "Being on President Nixon's enemies list was the highest single honour I've ever received," he said proudly, after lending his support to Tricky Dicky's opponent Eugene McCarthy. This approach to life later led him to become a philanthropist, setting up his own branded food company which gave profits to charity. Though he found the whole thing hard to take seriously, it has so far resulted in donations of over two hundred million dollars.
The great actor's other love was car racing, and he did it well. After picking up the habit whilst training for the 1969 film Winning, he went on to join the Bob Sharp Racing Team and compete in several major championships, eventually becoming c-owner of Newman-Haas Racing. He was still driving professionally in his seventies.
"I picture my epitaph: 'Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown," Newman once joked, always amused by his public image. As it turned out, he kept that famous stare to the very end, along with much of his famous energy, ceasing to work only this spring when his illness became too severe to allow him to continue. He died at his home in Connecticut, near where he and his wife had found "a nice cemetery". Without a doubt, Hollywood has lost one of its greatest stars.
