Paul Newman was an actor with real emotional traction, talent, charm and good looks, writes Donald Clarke

PAUL NEWMAN was born a full six years before James Dean, but though they were very different men, it could be argued that the older actor kicked open a door the doomed rebel had already unlocked.

Indeed, Newman's first significant role, playing Rocky Graziano in Somebody up There Likes Me, was originally intended for Dean. In 1954, two years before that film's release, Marlon Brando had mumbled his way through On The Waterfrontand demonstrated that the scary new techniques of method acting could secure a place in cinema. Yet, for all his success, Marlon was always a little too weird to dwell comfortably in the mainstream.

In sharp contrast, Paul Newman, a graduate of Yale University, the Actors Studio and the second World War, became the type of movie star to whom everyone warms.

Unlike Dean, he managed to drive fast cars without crashing (much). Unlike Brando, he never allowed fame to turn him into a lunatic.

There are, surely, no stars left who, upon their death, will receive the sort of coverage accorded Paul Newman this weekend.

Raised in suburban Cleveland by a Jewish father and a Slovakian mother, Newman was interested in theatre from an early age but, born in 1925, he had to defer his ambitions when war came. Following honourable service as an aviator in the US navy, he studied acting, went to a great many auditions and, after a few decent roles on Broadway, secured a leading part in the 1954 sword-and-sandals epic The Silver Chalice.

In 1956, his noble, faintly sat-upon performance as Graziano launched him towards stardom. Two years later he was unsettlingly kinetic as a mixed-up Billy the Kid in Arthur Penn's revisionist western The Left-Handed Gun. Starring turns in the lumbering Exodusand the durable Cool Hand Lukefollowed.

An unkind observer of Newman's early career might conclude that he offered the public a less frightening version of the 1950s method-acting maverick. If you found Dean a little too aggressive or felt that Montgomery Clift was a tad tortured, then, with his soothing blue eyes and relaxed manner, Paul Newman might be the man for you. This would be an unfair assessment. In 1961, Newman turned out as Fast Eddie Felson, a cocky pool player, in Robert Rossen's The Hustlerand demonstrated a unique ability to combine frailty with galloping charisma. Here was an actor with real emotional traction.

That talent and charm helped Paul Newman to prosper in the early 1960s and enabled him to survive the unkind cull of movie stars that took place at the turn of the next decade.

While other actors of his generation were being shuffled off to early retirement as murder suspects on Columbo, Newman joined forces with Robert Redford to star in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. George Roy Hill's buddy movie was released in 1969 and, with its amusingly anachronistic dialogue, managed to thrive in an era when the western was dying in its boots.

Now past 40, Newman was established as that unusual kind of movie star who defies fashion and, though he acted rarely in the last two decades of his life, he never lost that desirable status.

It is, however, true to say that Newman was largely ignored by the school of radical young directors that reinvented American cinema in the early 1970s. While the likes of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driverand Robert Altman's Nashvillewere winning awards, Newman, still popular, was drawing vast crowds to less adventurous pictures such as The Stingand The Towering Inferno.

Maybe he suffered from the same enviable problem that Stewart Granger, another actor who never lost his looks, described in later years. "I haven't aged into a character actor," he said. "I'm still an old leading man."

At any rate, Robert Altman eventually cast him in 1976's underrated Buffalo Bill and the Indiansand, in 1986, his return to the role of Fast Eddie in Scorsese's The Color of Moneyfinally secured him a proper Oscar. (A year earlier, the academy, panicking prematurely, had presented him with an honorary statuette.) As is often the case, the best actor award was for the wrong film.

His performance in The Verdict(1982) was one of the greatest in his career, but that year he had the misfortune to find himself up against Ben Kingsley in the unstoppable Gandhi. Later, he was touching in the fine Nobody's Fool(1994) and frightening in Sam Mendes's Road to Perdition(2002).

Still, even if Paul Newman had not won that Oscar, he would, we suspect, never have complained about being unfulfilled. Away from the camera, he enjoyed driving fast cars and managed to win a few prestigious races.

He directed the odd film and his salad dressings, the profits from which all go to charity, still sit on supermarket shelves throughout the planet.

Newman also managed one more rare achievement in Hollywood: he married very well. In January this year, Newman and Joanne Woodward, his second wife, celebrated 50 happy years together.

When asked about the temptations of infidelity, he famously quipped: "Why go out for hamburger when you have steak at home?"

Woodward, a distinguished actor in her own right, survives him.