In 1986, Paul Newman finally took the Oscar home for The Color of Money, the old pool hall swagger of Fast Eddie Felson sharpened into a victory at last. After years of near misses, he stood among the greats with an Academy Award for Best Actor, and the strange thing was that by then he had already become more than a star. He was an actor, a racer, a philanthropist, and a man who seemed to keep turning up where talent met purpose.

He had begun far from Hollywood glamour, born on 26 January 1925 in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and raised in Shaker Heights by Theresa Garth and Arthur Sigmund Newman Sr., who ran a sporting goods store. At ten, he was already onstage at the Cleveland Play House in Saint George and the Dragon. He graduated from Shaker Heights High School in 1943, studied at Ohio University, then after the war earned a BA in drama and economics from Kenyon College in 1949.

The craft came slowly and properly. He toured with summer stock companies, spent a year at the Yale School of Drama, and then studied under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York City. His Broadway debut came in Picnic in 1953 with Kim Stanley, where he met Joanne Woodward, his future wife. Television followed, then Hollywood, and by the mid-1950s he had fought through a bad first film, The Silver Chalice, into real notice with Somebody Up There Likes Me in 1956.

The rise was relentless. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1958 brought his first Academy Award nomination opposite Elizabeth Taylor. The Hustler in 1961 made him Fast Eddie; Hud in 1963, Cool Hand Luke in 1967, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969 made him the face of American cool. He worked with Robert Redford, Steve McQueen, Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Gleason, and Joanne Woodward, and he directed Rachel, Rachel in 1968, proving he was not merely a handsome lead but a serious filmmaker too.

Yet the hinge of his life was never only the camera. In World War II he served in the United States Navy in the Pacific, trained at Yale in the V-12 pilot programme, and was later sent to Hawaii as Aviation Radioman Third Class Newman. A grounded assignment kept him off the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill before a kamikaze attack killed hundreds aboard in spring 1945. He carried that near-miss into The Rack in 1956, and later into a life marked by discipline, not luck.