He was born in comfortable Shaker Heights, Ohio, on Jan. 26, 1925, to a Jewish father who was a successful sporting-goods store owner and a Catholic-turned-Christian Scientist mother who encouraged his interest in the theater.
His early life included two years in the Navy Air Corps during World War II, a stint selling encyclopedias and study at Kenyon College, where he joined the football team and took up acting seriously.
Upon graduation, he worked in summer stock in Williams Bay, Wis., where he met his first wife, Jacqueline Witte. He also joined the Woodstock Players in Woodstock, Ill. When his father died, Mr. Newman took a year off to the run the sporting-goods store. But he couldn't keep himself from what he used to call the one thing he knew he was good at.
In 1951, after 18 months at the store, he left to study at the Yale School of Drama. Without finishing his degree, he left New Haven for New York in the summer of 1952, and soon landed on Broadway in William Inge's Picnic. On that production he met Joanne Woodward, whom he married a half-dozen years later in a union that became legendary not just for its staying power but also for its happiness.
Mr. Newman would go on to star in hits such as Joseph Hayes' Desperate Hours and Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. He scored equally choice jobs on television, including an adaptation of the Hemingway story The Battler and the original TV dramatization of Bang the Drum Slowly .
He made his strongest impact as a performer on the big screen. The movie that gave him the necessary push was Somebody Up There Likes Me, based on the life of boxer Rocky Graziano.
"After movies like Champion and Body and Soul, I can't tell you how refreshing it was to see a joyful boxing film," Towne said. The role allowed Mr. Newman to release his exuberant physicality and tap his deep sympathy for blue-collar life. He didn't move to consolidate his stardom; he took chances. He played Billy the Kid as a wild innocent in Arthur Penn's The Left-Handed Gun, a film that became known for the expressiveness and originality of its violence. He forged a working friendship with a once-blacklisted director, Martin Ritt, on that filmmaker's first smash, The Long Hot Summer.
As the drifter who comes into a family-run town and connects with the patriarch's virginal daughter (Ms. Woodward), Mr. Newman nailed what film critic Pauline Kael called "one of the those arrogant-on-the-outside vulnerable-on-the-inside roles that Newman could do better than any other movie actor."
