No other actor blurred the line that divides the dangerous from the merely mischievous, the rogue from the renegade, like Paul Newman. So great were the sum of his parts that his characters - from Fast Eddie Felson to Butch Cassidy, Hud Bannon to Reg Dunlop - seemed like facets of the real Paul Newman; he was not a chameleon because he did not need to be. Newman was the real McCoy, one of the last real movie stars, back when that term wasn't considered implicitly distinct from "actor." He leaves behind a body of work - 65 films, many of them among the greatest in the history of the form, over a 50 year career - that is simply without peer. More than that, he leaves behind a legacy of charitable endeavor that marks him out as a truly exemplary human being, and perhaps that is what we will miss most: as Mr. Newman himself was quoted in the New York Times' obituary as telling a reporter, “We are such spendthrifts with our lives. The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”
