BY CHARLES TAYLOR
It's flip to say that the first half of Paul Newman's career shows how little acting can count for in the movies, while the second half shows how it can count for everything. The Newman of "The Long Hot Summer," "The Hustler," "Hud" and "Cool Hand Luke" was certainly an actor, and the Newman of "Slap Shot," "Fort Apache the Bronx," "Absence of Malice," "Blaze" and "Twilight" is by God a movie star. But pare down the exaggeration and you arrive at a kernel of truth. Had Paul Newman not made the change in his acting that began with 1977's "Slap Shot," made the conscious decision to delve deeper into himself and see what surprises might be waiting there, he might have spent his later screen career as a charming memento of the gorgeous and cocky smartass he started out as. Newman must have recognized that, and in the roles of the late '70s and early '80s, he found a way out. It's easy to look at those performances as the finest vintage of a dependable old pro. I'd argue that they are as exploratory and revelatory and, in their most daring moments, as naked as the work of Sean Penn, Robert Downey Jr. and Nicolas Cage, the finest actors of their generation.

Newman, who was born in Cleveland in 1925, began acting during his years at Ohio's Kenyon College, where he enrolled after serving in the Navy Air Corps in World War II. From Kenyon, he moved on to the Yale Drama School and then, like many of the other great actors who emerged in the '60s, to New York's Actors Studio. He appeared in the 1953 Broadway production of William Inge's "Picnic," but he was lucky enough to begin his career as a working actor at a time when live television drama (on shows like "Playhouse 90") enlarged the job market for New York actors beyond the stage. His first movie role came in 1955 with "The Silver Chalice," a biblical epic so disastrous that years later, when it ran on TV in New York, Newman took out newspaper ads asking people not to watch it.

Newman found more prototypical Method roles as boxer Rocky Graziano in the biopic "Somebody Up There Likes Me" and as Billy the Kid in Arthur Penn's "psychological" western "The Left-Handed Gun." But unlike Marlon Brando or Montgomery Clift or James Dean, Newman has never seemed to be drawing on a well of neuroses. Comparing Newman to some of the other actors who came out of the Actors Studio, Pauline Kael once wrote, "They can do desperately troubled psychological states ... but they're so inward you can't see them getting through a competently managed average day." Arriving in the movies at a time when movie stars were starting to sweat off a little of the polish the studios had applied to them, Newman combined a more grounded version of the earthier, edgier style that had been making inroads into mainstream acting with the sex appeal that has always defined movie stars.

Newman was lucky enough not just to be blessed with a trim, athletic build (which he has kept) and incredibly bright blue eyes, but to have the charisma to back them up. When someone looks like Paul Newman, audiences are eager to like him. And they did, even when he played bastards -- like the pool shark Fast Eddie Felson in "The Hustler" (the role he'd return to in "The Color of Money"); the drinking, rutting cattle hand in Martin Ritt's hypocritically entertaining "Hud"; and the barn burner in Ritt's deluxe Southern soaper "The Long, Hot Summer," made in 1958, the same year in which Newman married his co-star, Joanne Woodward. Newman is called on to do some rotten things in these roles -- slapping around Piper Laurie in "The Hustler" and nearly raping Patricia Neal in "Hud." We're not expected to like him in those moments, and that's why they're miscalculations. Who doesn't want to like Paul Newman? He's one of those actors with such instinctive audience rapport that he gets you on his side, seemingly without even trying.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. The sexy young Paul Newman is content to take his own sweet time

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