Paul Newman has died after a long bout with cancer. Nothing shocking here - it became obvious a few months ago that he was done for. He had long since ceased being a working actor and passed into the realm of the legend who had somehow outlived himself. The mind struggled to connect the frail old man with the incredibly virile, beautiful, talented blue-eyed cinema god. Now it doesn't have to try.
It's hard picking out a single greatest Newman performance but Cool Hand Luke is a good place to start. The most famous scene is probably this one - "I can eat 50 eggs."
Of course there was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - and The Hustler. And then he aged magnificently into roles like the washed-up lawyer in The Verdict and the washed-up pool shark in The Color of Money and the crusty old father in Nobody's Fool. He's mostly associated with these performances and that late-50s/60s Method era where he played Billy the Kid in The Left-Handed Gun and the sick-hot degenerate fucker in The Long Hot Summer (his first movie co-starring alongside Joanne Woodward) - but he was old enough to have starred in straight Hollywood schmaltz like The Silver Chalice too. And of course he was Butch Cassidy...and always will be, no matter who else plays him.
