By the time Mr. Newman played Brick in the movie version of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hit Tin Roof, Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic's authority on stage and movie acting, hailed Mr. Newman as his own man, not some Brando and Dean imitator. He wrote that his performance was "genuinely creative - the kind of acting in which buried smoldering is made manifest," praising Mr. Newman for his ability to bring out "the thought processes between lines."
He would cement his screen persona in a series of groundbreaking movies in the 1960s. Robert Rossen's black and white marvel of action and character, The Hustler, helped Mr. Newman mint the roguish image that he would refine and vary in later hits like Hud and Cool Hand Luke. In The Hustler, Mr. Newman creates a portrait of the artist as a pool player. This drama of corruption and regeneration depicts what great art demands: qualities of character like patience and honesty as well as talent and originality. After that, Mr. Newman was on a roll.
In Ritt's Hud he embraced the character of a charismatic contemporary cowboy with such gusto that audiences loved him despite his callousness and materialism, simply because he had more life and snap to him than anyone else in his Texas town. In Stuart Rosenberg's Cool Hand Luke he played a decorated World War II veteran and peacetime ne'er-do-well who can't conform to save his life. Mr. Newman's contained charisma and paradoxical modesty were perfect for the role of a natural martyr-rebel who was also an incorrigible joker.
No matter what you thought of the comic Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the caper film The Sting, he and Robert Redford brought peerless warmth and invention to the roles of picaresque buddies. Audiences loved the way they tossed chunks of the movie to each other as lightly and deftly in these mammoth productions as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert do now on nightly TV.
His portrait of a tormented lawyer in The Verdict shocked and delighted critics and moviemakers because of the contrast it drew with his usual geniality. By then he had become that rarest of movie performers, one whose face is always alive to the camera, one who seems to slip into his parts as naturally as he would slip into new clothes.
Even as his face and body seemed to resist the ravages of time, he played older characters with wholehearted honesty. In Blaze as well as Nobody's Fool, he showed that characters who are unreconstructed rapscallions can age heroically.
He is beloved for his characters on the screen and his character off-screen. Upon learning of his death, many fans felt shock as well as sorrow. As Mr. Shelton said, "I thought he'd live to be, I don't know, 1,500."
