Actor; Born January 26, 1925; Died September 25, 2008 PAUL Newman, who has died aged 83, was one of the greatest Hollywood stars of the past 50 years.

Actor; Born January 26, 1925; Died September 25, 2008

PAUL Newman, who has died aged 83, was one of the greatest Hollywood stars of the past 50 years.

As poolroom hustler Fast Eddie Felson, convict Cool Hand Luke and western outlaw Butch Cassidy, Newman moulded the image of the modern Hollywood anti-hero.

His characters were rebels and social misfits, who insolently challenged authority, law and order, sometimes witty and charming, sometimes mean and selfish, yet still seductively attractive as they recklessly head for disaster.

Back in 1954, the then-unknown Newman tested alongside the then-unknown James Dean for the starring roles of the two brothers in East of Eden. Dean was cast, Newman was not. And after Dean's early death, Newman was initially regarded by critics as some sort of James Dean Lite.

But he was nominated for the best actor Oscar no fewer than four times in 10 years - for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963) and Cool Hand Luke (1967).

Newman developed his own screen persona: tougher, more muscular than Dean, wittier and more cerebral than McQueen. By the end of the 1960s he was rated the biggest box-office draw in cinema.

With those famous blue eyes, Newman was strikingly handsome. Women loved him, though curiously he had greater success in buddy movies, most notably Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), than he did in romantic ones.

His on-screen relationships with women were often difficult. One of the more successful was that odd menage a trois with Robert Redford and Katharine Ross in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, though ultimately the guys head off together.

Off-screen, Newman enjoyed a long and happy marriage to Oscar-winning actress Joanne Woodward, whom he met when they were working together on the Broadway play Picnic in 1953.

It was his second marriage and, according to standard sources, they married just one day after his divorce from his first wife, on January 29, 1958.

Newman disapproved of Hollywood's careless attitude to fidelity, and famously (if rather cringingly) said: "Why go out for hamburger when you have steak at home?"

Politically, he was a liberal and he donated around $250m of profits to charity from his Newman's Own food brands. His belated Oscar, for The Hustler sequel The Color of Money (1986), reflected his popularity rather than the quality of that particular film or his performance in it.

In total, he received nine nominations for acting Oscars, the last being for the thriller Road to Perdition (2002), in which he played a crime boss and Tom Hanks's adoptive father. The Academy also gave him a couple of special awards and he also had one nomination as a producer.

The son of a prosperous Jewish store-owner, Paul Leonard Newman was born in 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio. During the Second World War he applied to become a pilot, but it turned out he was colour-blind. He trained as a radio operator instead and served in the Pacific, but, according to his own account, he saw little in the way of action.

He studied economics and drama at college, acted in provincial theatre and married actress Jackie Witte in 1949. In 1950, Newman's father died and he returned to Cleveland to work at the store. When the family sold the business, Newman resumed his drama studies at Yale.

"I wasn't driven to acting by any inner compulsion," he once said, when he was aged almost 30. "I was running away from the sporting goods business."

From Yale, he headed for New York and studied at the famous Actors Studio, with James Dean. He secured regular television work, made his mark on Broadway in Picnic and his film debut in The Silver Chalice (1954), a religious drama set in ancient times, which Newman regarded as the worst film ever made. When it was shown on television, he took out a newspaper advert apologising for its quality.

He established himself as a major new talent with a role originally intended for Dean, who died in a car crash in 1955, that of real-life boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956).

Rocky was the template for many Newman characters - no matter how many times they were knocked down they kept getting up and coming back for more.

Newman perfected that type of character a decade later with Cool Hand Luke, who refuses to accept either authority or defeat, no matter what the odds or the challenge, whether it is a game of poker, a fist fight or a bet on the number of eggs he can eat.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Newman appeared in a string of classics, equally at home with westerns and Tennessee Williams. He was brilliant squabbling with Liz Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and starred in Sweet Bird of Youth on Broadway in 1959 and on film three years later.

In the western genre, he provided a modern, psychological spin on Billy the Kid in The Left-Handed Gun (1958) and even managed to pull off an Apache in Hombre (1967) - the blue eyes explained away by the fact he was adopted.

He was less comfortable with comedy, though he brought a light touch to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and its unofficial follow-up The Sting (1973), which collected all the Oscars that Butch should have won. Newman's laidback demeanour contrasted well with Robert Redford's slightly stiffer presence in both films.

The Towering Inferno (1974) provided the chance to co-star with Steve McQueen and a fat pay cheque, though Newman never sold out, as some ageing stars did, continuing to make smaller films as well - and refusing to film in the summer, which he spent racing cars, with considerable distinction.

He competed in the Le Mans 24-hour race, played a racing driver in the 1969 film Winning and provided the voice for one of the characters in the animated film Cars (2006).

His later films include Absence of Malice (1981), The Verdict (1982) and The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). He also directed five films, with Woodward appearing in four of them, including Rachel, Rachel (1968).

His first marriage lasted nine years and produced three children. His son, Scott, died of a drugs overdose. He and Woodward also had three children.

• By BRIAN PENDREIGH