Paul Newman, the legendary movie star and irreverent cultural icon who created a model philanthropy fueled by profits from a salad dressing that became nearly as famous as he was, has died. He was 83.

Newman died Friday at his home near Westport, Conn., after a long battle with cancer, publicist Jeff Sanderson said.

Stunningly handsome, Newman maintained his superstar status while keeping his distance from its corrupting influences through nearly 100 Broadway, television and movie roles. As an actor and director, he evolved into Hollywood's elder statesman, admired off screen for his quiet generosity, unconventional business sense, race car daring, political activism and enduring marriage to actress Joanne Woodward.

Annoyed by the public's fascination with his resemblance to a Roman statue and his Windex-blue eyes, Newman often chose offbeat character roles. In the 1960s, he helped define the American anti-hero and became identified with the charming misfits, cads and con men in film classics such as "The Hustler," "Hud," "Cool Hand Luke" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."

'POWERFUL ELOQUENCE'

"It's a great loss, in so many ways," Martin Scorsese, who directed Newman in "The Color of Money," said in a statement yesterday. "The history of movies without Paul Newman? It's unthinkable. ... His powerful eloquence, his consummate sense of craft, so consummate that you didn't see any sense of effort up there on the screen, set a new standard."

Robert Redford, Newman's "Sundance" co-star, said in a statement, "There is a point where feelings go beyond words. I have lost a real friend. My life — and this country — is better for his being in it."

Newman's poker-game look in "The Sting" — cunning, watchful, removed, amused, confident, alert — summed up his power as a person and actor, said Stewart Stern, a screenwriter and longtime friend.

"You never see the whole deck, there's always some card somewhere he may or may not play," Stern said. "Maybe he doesn't even have it."

Newman claimed his success came less from natural talent than from hard work, luck and the tenacity of a terrier.

"Acting," he once said, "is really nothing but exploring certain facets of your own personality trying to become someone else." In early films, he said he tried to make himself fit the character but later aimed "to make the character come to me."

The actor was most proud, friends say, of his later, Oscar-nominated roles in "Absence of Malice," "The Verdict" and "Nobody's Fool," in which he dug deeply into the complex emotions of ordinary men struggling for dignity, justice or a sense of connection.

In 2003, he was nominated for an Oscar for his last feature film appearance, as a conflicted mob boss in "Road to Perdition." Two years later, at 80, he won an Emmy for playing a meddlesome father in "Empire Falls."

"He's a majestic figure in the world of acting," said director Arthur Penn, who worked with him in his early career. "He did everything and did it well."

Part of a generation of edgy, naturalistic New York actors who changed Hollywood in the '50s and '60s, Newman was often compared with fellow Method actors Marlon Brando and James Dean.

Nominated eight times for Academy Awards in the best-actor category, Newman won only once, for "The Color of Money" (1986), in which he reprised the role of "Fast Eddie" Felson that he originated in 1961's "The Hustler." He also took home honorary Oscars in 1985 for career achievement and in 1993 for his humanitarian efforts. In later years, however, he boycotted awards shows despite continuing Oscar, Emmy and Tony nominations. He claimed he no longer owned a tuxedo.

In real life, Newman was "the quintessence of class, courtly without being old-fashioned," said Victor Navasky, former editor of the Nation, a liberal magazine in which Newman invested and wrote occasional columns. Private and complex, Newman was also a beer-loving, mischievous prankster and an idealist who took to the streets to protest the war in Vietnam.

He was thrilled, friends said, when he heard that he had made President Nixon's enemies list.

HIGHLY COMPETITIVE

Married since 1958 to Woodward, his second wife, Newman cultivated a distinctly un-Hollywood lifestyle, shuttling between a homey New York apartment and a renovated farmhouse in woodsy Westport, from which he pursued passions including cooking and auto racing.

Highly competitive, Newman was drawn to the track, he told reporters, because in racing, unlike acting, the definition of "good" is not a murky matter of opinion. Although he began to race at 47, he was ranked among the sport's top 25 percent of drivers, his team placing second in the prestigious Le Mans endurance contest in 1979.

At 70, he became the oldest driver to place in a professionally sanctioned auto race when his team took third in the 24-hour race at Daytona, Fla.

Still racing into his 80s, Newman escaped uninjured from a car fire in 2005 and entered another race a month later.

Since the 1980s, Newman had devoted more time to Newman's Own, a food products company he founded as a lark that grew into one of the nation's largest charitable organizations. The company, which produces all-natural salad dressing, popcorn, sauces and lemonade, has turned over more than $250 million in after-tax profits to hundreds of groups, including his own Hole in the Wall Gang camps (named after the outlaw gang in "Butch Cassidy").

INTEREST IN ARTS

Newman was born in Cleveland on Jan. 26, 1925, the second of two boys of Arthur S. Newman, a partner in a sporting goods store, and Theresa Fetzer Newman. He was raised in the affluent suburb of Shaker Heights, where he was encouraged to pursue his interest in the arts by his mother and his uncle Joseph Newman, a well-known Ohio poet and journalist.

Friends and neighbors in Shaker Heights might not have foreseen a future as a sex symbol for Paul Leonard Newman.

He was too short and scrawny to play football or baseball and once said he regularly had "the bejesus kicked out" of him in school. He was encouraged in the arts by an uncle who wrote poetry and by his mother, who taught him to appreciate music and books and shared details of theater shows she had seen.

Although he acted in elementary and high school plays to the delight of his family, he said his father, a strict, hard-working former journalist, considered him a lightweight and often treated him as if he were disappointed in him.

"I desperately wanted to show him that somehow, somewhere along the line I could cut the mustard," Newman told Time magazine in 1982. One of the great agonies of his life, he said, was that his father died in 1950 without seeing his success.

At 18, he enlisted in the Navy hoping to become a pilot in World War II but was rejected for being color blind. He spent three years as a third-class radio operator aboard bombers in the South Pacific.

Afterward, he enrolled as a 21-year-old freshman at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where he spent some of his happiest days, playing second-string football, drinking beer and getting in trouble. After a barroom brawl landed him in jail, he was kicked off the team and he turned to acting.

"I was probably one of the worst college actors at the time," Newman said years later. "I learned my lines by rote and simply said them without spontaneity, without knowing what it meant to act and react."

After graduating with a degree in English, Newman acted in summer and winter stock productions in Wisconsin and Illinois, thinking eventually he might teach speech or drama. By then, he had married Jacqueline Witte, a fellow actor, with whom he would have three children: Scott, Susan and Stephanie. Scott died in 1978 of an overdose of drugs and alcohol.

When his father died in 1950, Newman moved home to run the sporting goods store. A year later, the store was sold and he fled to New Haven, Conn., where he briefly studied drama at Yale University, specializing in directing, before trying his luck in New York.

In New York, then the center of live television and the home of the famed Actors Studio, Newman picked up lessons in Method acting, a technique that stressed naturalism, while he auditioned for parts and sold encyclopedias to support his family.

STARTED IN SMALL ROLES

Described as "gorgeous and intense," the young Newman quickly found small parts in television shows such as "You Are There," as well as a role as a rich college graduate in the Broadway production of "Picnic," in which he and Woodward were understudies.

His marriage deteriorated as he began to attract work and positive reviews while his wife's priorities shifted to the children, according to friends. Newman then fell into a period of turmoil in which he and Woodward began an affair.

His first wife obtained a divorce in Mexico in 1957. A year later, Newman and Woodward married, a lasting match that Newman attributed to "correct amounts of lust and respect." The couple had three children.

Newman and Woodward appeared together in 11 films, including "The Long Hot Summer," "From the Terrace" and "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge." Newman also directed her in four other movies, including the highly respected "Rachel, Rachel," about a schoolteacher whose fears keep her trapped in a small town.

Throughout the '60s, Newman took high-profile stands against the war in Vietnam. In 1968, he campaigned for antiwar candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy and served as a Connecticut delegate to the Democratic National Convention. The following year, he and Woodward joined an antiwar demonstration in front of the American Embassy in London.

In 1981, Newman was nominated for an Oscar for his role in "Absence of Malice," as a businessman libeled by Sally Field's gung-ho young reporter, whose story leads to his friend's suicide.

Another nomination followed for his portrayal of an alcoholic lawyer redeemed by his pursuit of justice in 1982's "The Verdict."

When Newman finally won an Oscar in 1986 for "The Color of Money," it was neither his nor director Scorsese's best effort and was seen by some observers as compensation for having been overlooked in "The Hustler."

Wanting to avoid another public defeat, Newman stayed home for the ceremony. Later, he said of the win: "It's like chasing a beautiful woman for 80 years. She finally relents and you say, 'I'm terribly sorry, I'm tired.' "

PRODUCTS FOR CHARITY

His real-life role as a model Hollywood philanthropist began just before Christmas 1980 when he and his friend A.E. Hotchner made a batch of salad dressing in a bathtub to bottle for friends.

The company grew to include a range of products including popcorn, salsas, pasta sauces, marinades and Woodward's "Old Fashioned Roadside Virgin Lemonade."

As a result of his business success, Newman donated more than $250 million to 1,000 groups — including the Scott Newman Center devoted to anti-drug education and several Hole in the Wall Gang camps, designed for children with life-threatening diseases, with locations in France, Ireland and Israel as well as the U.S.

"If I leave a legacy," he said in 2006, "it will be the camps."

In 2007, Newman announced his decision to retire, saying he'd lost confidence in his abilities, that acting was "pretty much a closed book for me."

In addition to his wife, Newman is survived by daughters Susan, Stephanie, Nell, Melissa and Clea; two grandchildren; and his brother Arthur.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.