Paul Newman in his prime. (Getty Images)

It was all too appropriate that one of Paul Newman’s first films was titled Somebody Up There Likes Me. As a movie star, Newman seemed to have been twice blessed by the gods. Not only was he a paragon of physical beauty, with a sculpted face worthy of Michelangelo’s chisel and the dreamiest of dreamy blue eyes. He also was one hell of an actor, and he left behind a string of vibrant dramatic performances — from The Hustler and Hud to The Verdict and The Color of Money — in a career that spanned six decades.

Newman, who succumbed to cancer Sept. 27 at the age of 83, seemed to appreciate his incredible good fortune. In return, he shunned Hollywood’s temptations, living quietly in Connecticut with actress Joanne Woodward, his wife of 50 years, and using his fame to create a line of popular food products whose profits went to charity.

In the parallel world we live in as filmgoers, there are some actors we get to know so well, over such a long period of time, that they become like old friends. Newman was like that for me. I’ll never forget the first time I met him, on the screen of the lone movie theatre in a small Saskatchewan town. I was a small boy and he was in his prime: lean, wiry and cocky, with those blazing blue eyes, in Cool Hand Luke. My dad had taken me to see the picture – a little bit of father-and-son bonding – and for its two-hour running time, I was lifted out of my dusty Prairie surroundings and into a sultry Deep South of chain gangs and bloodhounds, mirrored sunglasses and thick drawls. Newman’s incorrigible antihero — beaten to a bloody pulp by big George Kennedy, but refusing to give up — had a lot of resonance for a kid just getting into his first schoolyard scuffles.

Cool Hand Luke was one of the classic guy movies that Newman became famous for. If he wasn’t working on the chain gang or hustling pool, he was slinging a gun or pulling off a big con in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, respectively. In those two hits of the early 1970s, he was paired with the young Robert Redford, an actor who was almost as beautiful ashe was.

Growing up with those movies and other Newman vehicles of the time – from the disaster blockbuster The Towering Inferno to the rowdy little hockey comedy Slap Shot – I at first dismissed him as just another macho star. Off screen, I had read, he chugged Coors and, like his contemporary (and Inferno co-star) Steve McQueen, raced cars. Then one night in my teens, I happened to switch on the television and caught him in the 1962 film of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth. As Chance Wayne, a former pretty boy going to seed, Newman was miscast – he was such a gorgeous hunk of man that when the other characters said he was losing his looks, you had to laugh. Yet when he spoke Williams’s lyrical dialogue, he made it sing.

It was a revelation. I found he was even better as Brick, the alcoholic ex-jock in the 1958 film of Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Once again, he was handsomely dissolute, clinking the ice in his bourbon glass as he told Elizabeth Taylor’s sexually frustrated Maggie the Cat to take a leap and find a new lover. Newman had come to film via the theatre and it showed. The opposite of the classic laconic American leading man, his way with lines was as electrifying as those blue eyes.

He often played rebels and outlaws, drifters and losers, but they were seldom inarticulate. Unlike the mumbling Marlon Brando or the silent McQueen, Newman’s characters spilled their guts, launching into tirades or rhapsodies delivered with a rugged, fiery eloquence. There was no one more explosive than an angry Newman character – but then no actor had a sweeter smile. At times, his immense natural charm was at odds with his intentions. As the selfish, womanizing rancher in 1963’s Hud, he meant to give us a detestable heel; instead, audiences were seduced by his cheerful insouciance and made him an icon of cool. (It’s telling that in Midnight Cowboy, wannabe stud Jon Voight sticks a poster of Newman as Hud on his hotel room wall.)

Newman hated that misinterpretation – just as he hated his first film role, as a Greek sculptor in 1954’s The Silver Chalice, a dopey biblical epic. (Years later, when the movie appeared on television, he took out an ad asking people not to watch it.) He made up for that false start quickly, playing boxing champ Rocky Graziano in his next film, Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), and then starring as the cunning Ben Quick in the Faulkner-based 1958 drama The Long, Hot Summer, opposite Woodward. They married the same year and would appear together in 10 films.

In 1968, Newman ventured behind the camera to direct Woodward in Rachel, Rachel, a screen adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s novel A Jest of God. It was the start of a sporadic but noteworthy directing career. My favourite Newman-helmed film was his appropriately claustrophobic 1987 version of The Glass Menagerie. Once again he worked magic with Tennessee Williams, drawing a cyclonic performance from Woodward and an eccentric but brilliant one from a young John Malkovich.

Newman never made the full transition from leading man to director, à la Clint Eastwood, but then he had a lot more to offer onscreen. I only wish we’d seen more of him in later years. In the 1980s, he gave a couple of great performances, as the washed-up, anxiety-riddled lawyer Frank Galvin in Sidney Lumet’s courtroom drama The Verdict and as aging pool shark Fast Eddie Felson in Martin Scorsese’s sequel to The Hustler, The Color of Money – the role that won him a belated Oscar. The '90s saw him co-star with Woodward as a pair of repressed WASPs in Merchant Ivory’s Mr. and Mrs. Bridge and as a crooked corporate honcho in the Coen brothers’ comedy The Hudsucker Proxy. More recently, he received critical plaudits and a Tony nomination as the stage manager in the 2003 Broadway revival of Our Town. His final movie role, however, was as the gruff voice of a 1951 Hudson Hornet in the 2006 animated comedy Cars. No doubt it was a kick for Newman the auto buff, but it wasn’t quite the swan song we were hoping for.

No matter. Thanks to film, Newman is immortal. We can still see him at the height of his beauty and power as Hud or Butch, Eddie or Luke, and relive our memories of him. Not long ago, I revisited Cool Hand Luke for the first time in a decade, and that long-ago night in a small-town cinema came rushing back. It’s not my favourite Newman film, though. The one I’ve returned to the most is The Hustler (1961). Maybe it’s because that picture, directed by Robert Rossen, combines the thrill of the sport-based guy movie with a strong dramatic narrative. Maybe it’s because it boasts two superb supporting performances: George C. Scott as Fast Eddie’s manager, the coolly calculating Bert Gordon, and Jackie Gleason as Eddie’s nemesis, the elegant Minnesota Fats. Certainly, it’s because of Newman’s magnetic screen presence as Eddie, the gifted but reckless loudmouth whose path to maturity is strewn with failure and heartbreak.

There are few scenes more intense than the final showdown between Eddie and Fats. Sadder but wiser, Newman’s lithe young hustler, fuelled by cold anger, circles the pool table like a merciless bird of prey. In the end, a crestfallen Fats has to concede defeat. “I quit, Eddie,” he says frankly. “I can’t beat you.”

Paul Newman, no one could beat you.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.