Centre Piece: A tribute to Paul Newman

It is hardly the least of Paul Newman's achievements that for 26 years, his face grinned from the front of a salad dressing bottle, yet he never sacrificed a drop of dignity. Dignity was Newman's calling card as an actor, but it may have also been his Achilles heel: in his great younger roles, he established a strong, charming, graceful on-screen persona, but only sometimes revealed, or revelled in, its flaws and stresses. That would come later, in the Eighties onwards, when Newman developed a curmudgeonly line in cranky authority figures or prickly but likeable broken souls. Those late parts ensured that he made his exit haloed with respect, if not absolutely with late-period greatness.

But Newman will be remembered best for the rebels he played through the Fifties and Sixties – tough, feral but elegant and oddly courteous, even at their sweatiest. He was muscular and vulnerable opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), muscular and brutish as the rebarbative anti-hero of Hud (1963). In 1967, he played a role that marked a generational handover from Fifties outsiders to Sixties counter-culture toughs: the rebel as joker and martyr in the prison drama Cool Hand Luke.

Of his Sixties roles, the one that may endure best was the restless pool shark "Fast" Eddie Felson in Robert Rossen's The Hustler (1961): Newman's playfulness and predatory energy overlapped with the character in a perfect fit. He revisited the role in Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money (1986), playing Felson as a survivor freighted down with world-weariness; his pairing with Tom Cruise as a protégé and would-be usurper made for a tart commentary on male narcissism and transience in the Hollywood star market.

With beauty of a rugged, genial stamp, the young Newman came across as athletic and urbane, never averse to flirting with the camera, but rarely dandyish. No-nonsense and quintessentially masculine, his persona was miles away from the feminised sensitivity and neuroticism of his contemporaries Montgomery Clift and James Dean, further still from Marlon Brando's unruly showmanship. But he sometimes felt the temptation of working those famous mint-cool eyes for the camera: the hugely successful Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) was an egregious example, not so much a Western as an animated fan poster.

Newman became a richer, more complex actor as he aged, able to slough off the burden of wolfish charm. He was a revelation in Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), demystifying the Wild West hero as a fraud living off his own PR – in the process dismantling some of the star's own glamour to salutory effect. Sidney Lumet's 1982 drama The Verdict placed Newman in a severe and claustrophobic courtroom frame, as a burnt-out lawyer given a last shot at redemption. Two autumnal films for writer-director Robert Benton cast Newman as apparent losers, whose dramas yielded layers of mature philosophical wryness: Nobody's Fool (1994), as a small-town individualist, and the underrated Los Angeles noir thriller Twilight (1998), one of Hollywood's few truly thoughtful essays on mortality.

Newman's status as screen treasure was hugely enhanced by his choosiness: he appeared in nine films in the Eighties and only five in the Nineties, avoiding the aura-deflation suffered by Brando, Nicholson, De Niro et al. Terrifying steely-eyed elders were a pushover for him: he was a gangster grandee in Sam Mendes's The Road to Perdition (2002), but had most fun playing that type as a boardroom baron in the Coen brothers' farce The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). He likeably milked his elder-statesman grandeur, and his famous love of all things on four wheels, when he donated the voice of Doc Hudson to his last feature, the Pixar animation Cars (2006).

The sauce bottles and other Newman's Own products started in 1982, the millions of dollars the brand generated for charity further enhancing Newman's profile as a good egg – as did his famously solid marriage to Joanne Woodward, whom he directed in five films. But his status as an American liberal icon surely rests on his rarest honour: in 1971, he was the only actor to figure (in No 19 position) on Richard Nixon's enemies list.

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