Cool hand Paul

Quite recently at Cannes, where Paul Newman won the Best Actor prize in 1958, the festival showed a celebratory movie-montage of the stars who had graced its red carpet. The crowd sat politely through this confection, but were electrified at one moment: a shot of Newman's grizzled contemporary face that was in one brutal cut replaced with Newman as a glorious 20-something - with those electric blue eyes for which Technicolor could have been invented, and which black-and-white publicity stills could rarely do justice to, leaving them blank and bland.

The audience gasped, literally gasped, at Newman's forgotten beauty. This was the Hollywood Adonis who had once made straight women and gay men dizzy in his presence. But in the next moment, I heard the gasp become almost orchestrally modified; it became a gasp of pity or even despair that this is how all beauty ends up. It was as if we wanted to slash the screen, like Oscar Wilde's Basil Hayward, threatening to rip up Dorian Gray's picture with his palette knife.

Somehow, Newman had aged differently from the other stars. Narrow-eyed Clint Eastwood is recognisably the same as the man in the Dollars movies, even the boy in Rawhide. Burt Reynolds's waxy face, with all its work done, is perceptibly the same as those long-forgotten days when he ruled the 1970s box office. The puffy, bruised and careworn features of Brando the boxer in On the Waterfront prepared us for the lizardly appearance of his later career. And, of course, Robert Redford has strained every sinew in the cause of self-preservation.

Yet something else happened to Newman: he didn't care. Somewhere between the high-water mark of the classic western comedy Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and the legal drama The Verdict (1982), he looked not just older but different. The ends of his eyebrows and the corners of his mouth turned down, like arrow-chevrons. A moustache would periodically emphasise a new severity, as would the occasional appearance of Foster Grant shades. The voice rumbled and growled. This was his forbidding, opaque appearance in his Oscar-winning The Color of Money (1986), playing an older version of his pool-playing outlaw in The Hustler, now gruffly teaching a brash Tom Cruise.

Perhaps his face reflected the thoughtful, sober, everymannish guy who was there all along. This was the man's man who, famously uxorious and devoted to his wife Joanne Woodward, was very much off the market as far as dating was concerned. And it became the face of the serious actor who was in any case irritated by Hollywood's infatuation with looks. He was never an actor who came alive in relation to women: look at him in Hitchcock's Torn Curtain (1966), fiercely unsmiling, unable to confide in his supposed fiancée, Julie Andrews; he can't even look her in the eye.

Maybe his face simply experienced a seismic change after the death of his much-loved and wayward son Scott, from a drug overdose in 1978. Either way, Conrad Hall, the legendary cinematographer who had lit and shot Paul Newman in so many movies, was said to have burst into tears on preparing a close-up of him in Sam Mendes' Road To Perdition (2002), sobbing: "He was so beautiful!"

With his death, we have lost a major link to the old Hollywood studio system. Newman began his career within this set-up, which ruled Hollywood from the 20s to the 50s, a system by which stars were signed up like players on a football team and paid a wage. He came to the movies from the New York Actors Studio, and had imbibed not merely the method style, but the liberal mores of the New York of that period. He was a supporter of liberal causes and Democratic politicians for the rest of his life, even attaining the distinction of being on Richard Nixon's "Enemies List". Famously, Newman and his soon-to-be-wife Joanne Woodward became friends with Gore Vidal, and in the most egregious example of "bearding" in history, Woodward agreed to act, temporarily, as Vidal's "fiancée" to exempt him from conservative disapproval - an arrangement that could not really have deceived anyone but took the heat off Vidal, and afforded Newman and Woodward much hilarity.

Newman's relationship with Woodward is the enigma at the centre of his life and career: all marriages being, of course, a mystery to other people, and perhaps to the married themselves. She was a performer who was arguably better than Newman: certainly he passionately admired her as an artist and, perhaps, felt her Oscar success (for The Three Faces of Eve, in 1958) keenly before he won his. But their dual appearances were sometimes uneasy; mortifyingly, a poster for their cheesy early Broadway comedy Baby Want a Kiss is visible in the office of flopmeister Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks' The Producers. Newman was deeply aware that Woodward had hobbled her career to be a wife and mother to his children. Perhaps it is this complex relationship that was, in part, behind the anti-showboating and withdrawal that characterised his later public image.

Starting out, Newman was second string to the more famous method actors. He suffered the indignity of losing the lead role in On the Waterfront to Brando, and the lead in East of Eden to James Dean. Later, this competition was to be reversed, as the young Steve McQueen became obsessed with outpacing Newman, even fanatically counting the lines he had in The Towering Inferno (1974) and erupting with rage when he found out he had 16 fewer than Newman, his co-star.

His career took off with what Newman fans think of as the "H" movies of the 1960s: The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963), Hombre (1967), films with a raw, unsentimental feel, with Newman as the tough, laconic presence. Of these, perhaps the finest is The Hustler, in which Newman relaxed as never before, and forgot about the method pieties: he becomes real in a way that the Actors' Studio had never taught him.

But my favourite of his from this period, and perhaps of all his movies, is the less well-regarded Cool Hand Luke, directed by Stuart Rosenberg, from 1967. He plays the petty thief who drunkenly, almost uncaringly, gets pinched smashing the heads off parking meters, makes no attempt at escape or spending his ill-gotten (and paltry) gains and gets sentenced to work on a brutal chain gang. To kids reared on the comfy prison world of Porridge - as I was - it was a shock to see Cool Hand Luke, a very, very adult film that was nevertheless screened on BBC1 after Bruce Forsyth and the Generation Game in its Saturday Night at the Movies slot. I remember watching this film in my aunt's front room in Hendon, along with my granddad and my father (my mother, my sister and my aunt would be in the back room, chatting or playing cards). We, the menfolk, watched this film, and I was secretly thrilled and horrified that I was permitted to watch such a raunchy, violent, explicit film - more explicit, surely, than anything than would go out at a comparable time nowadays.

Despite his short hair in the side-parting cut that he wore throughout his life, this was the film that brought Newman closest to the long-haired counter-culture spirit of the 1960s. He was a rebel, but again, not a sexual rebel: he was a man in a society of men. That scene where he takes a bet that he can eat 50 eggs at a pop was pure Newman: game for anything, brave in a goofy way, and yet his bravery is of a piece with the bolshie anarchy, antagonism to the guards and the brutal system. In many ways, Cool Hand Luke was a 70s US movie before its time.

Paul Newman moved into his golden age with his buddy pictures opposite Robert Redford, Butch Cassidy and The Sting. While notionally around the same age, Newman is very much the older brother figure and it's pretty boy Redford who is expected to get the girl. Again, as with Cool Hand Luke, it's Newman's larky, atypical flashes of goofy comedy which stand out; in Cassidy, his wacky bike stunts for Katharine Ross to the accompaniment of Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head were the big set piece. From there, Newman suddenly moved up a generation, overtly defining himself as older in The Color Of Money, handing on the mantle to a younger man. This was the role that got him an Oscar after he had actually received an honorary Oscar, traditionally the signal for the end of a career. With stolid professionalism, Newman ploughed on, but the number of interesting parts for an older man were drying up.

Despite his Mount Rushmore status, Newman was a man for whom acting was not, in fact, everything. He was an accomplished director of smaller-scale projects, particularly those starring his wife; he was a successful race-car driver and manager, and a staggeringly triumphant entrepreneur in the food business, profitably marketing his own sauces, and setting a trend for dozens of celebrities trying (and failing) to do the same thing as vanity projects.

In his biography of Newman, Daniel O'Brien writes that Newman suggested the following droll epitaph for himself:

Here lies Paul Newman Who died a failure Because his eyes Turned brown.

Newman was gruffly dismissive of his looks, but never appeared to carry the sense of self-loathing that reportedly plagued Richard Burton, after the great Welsh actor made it big in the flibbertigibbet world of showbusiness. If they don't make them like that any more, it is because Paul Newman was an exemplar of that most unfashionable of things: manliness. He was masculine in an old-fashioned, untutored, un-ironic way, whether playing good guys or outlaws. And it is with manly reticence and calm that he has now taken his leave.