What other actor besides Paul Newman could convincingly play a character so likable, he could steal your girl and remain your best friend?

That was the magic Newman had on the big screen.

The legendary, Academy-Award winning actor with the riveting blue eyes died Friday after a long battle with cancer at his farmhouse near Westport, Conn. Family and close friends were at his side. He was 83.

This is one of those deaths when seemingly everyone, in and out of Hollywood, gasps upon hearing the news. We think back to how he affected our own life experiences.

The first time I remember being aware of Paul Newman was when I was 11 in Winnipeg. My friend Andre and I took two girls in our class to see Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid. Newman as Butch was a revelation -- a blue-eyed man's man who seldom resorted to violence, who solved everything (or tried to) with a wink and a wisecrack. 

'MEET THE FUTURE'

In the movie's most famous scene -- the bicycle ride with Etta (Katherine Ross) -- Ross' character had actually spent the previous night with Sundance (Robert Redford), when Newman's Butch shows up with a newfangled two-wheeler. Cue the soundtrack tune, Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head.

"Meet the future," Newman says to her cheerfully, and she is out the door to join him. It's a beautifully choreographed scene -- one of the most chastely romantic in modern film history -- that ends with Sundance discovering them together and, after a moment, shrugging and saying, "Take her."

Who else but Newman as Butch would make that scene believable?

After that, I started watching Newman's career in reverse order on late-night movies. His performance as the ultimate bad-boy in Hud was to be savoured, leading his nephew (the tragic Brandon DeWilde) astray until his eyes open. Watching him spit in the eye of authority as Cool Hand Luke was mesmerizing.

Going back to his Actors' Studio days, I even saw a kinescope on PBS of his performance in the teleplay of Bang The Drum Slowly, in which he played pitcher Henry Wiggins, hiding the truth about his catcher Bruce's (Albert Salmi) terminal illness.

Of course, there was The Hustler. Newman's scenes with Jackie Gleason as Minnesota Fats are etched in everyone's mind.

There were very few actors who could hold up in a scene with him. (I never really thought Redford was his equal, despite their popularity as a screen team). It's interesting that three who could were oversized fellows, the other two besides Gleason being Burl Ives (as Big Daddy opposite Newman as Brick in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof), and Orson Welles as Will Varner, a town baron who contrives to marry his spinster daughter (Joanne Woodward) off to drifter Ben Quick (Newman) in The Long Hot Summer. (It was during this movie that Newman divorced his first wife for Woodward, to whom he'd be married the rest of his life.)

It's generally conceded that the Best Actor Oscar Newman eventually won for the tepid 1986 Hustler sequel, The Color Of Money, was a make-good, but that sole trophy didn't even begin to make good for ... Harper, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, The Sting, Absence Of Malice, The Verdict, et al.

And he should have been awarded honorary Canadian citizenship just for the way he took to skates and did our national sport proud in the grimy and uproarious Slap Shot.

Newman was a rebel in winter by the time I interviewed him for the first time in 1990, for Mr. And Mrs. Bridge. (I'd get to pose questions to him again twice more, in 1994 for Nobody's Fool and in 2006 for his voicework in Disney-Pixar's Cars.) He turned out to be an uncomfortable interview, but one whose single-sentence answers could be practically poetic in their pithiness. Asked to describe his wife, he paused and pronounced quietly, "Tough ... cantankerous, delicious, lusty, disagreeable, fun."

"It's a pleasant spectrum to go back home to," he added with a smile.

"There is a lot of Paul in Mr. Bridge," Woodward said about the ram-rod stiff, hidebound lawyer from the novels of Evan Connell. "Paul is reticent, it's not easy for him to communicate his feelings. In one way it's why he's such a wonderful character actor, because his own feelings don't intrude on his performances.

"It's why he cooks and I make the public statements," she said. "He's a wonderful cook! Not a great public speaker."

CHANNELLING HIS FATHER

For his part, Newman claimed to be channelling his own father in Mr. Bridge -- Arthur Newman, a Cleveland sporting goods store owner who died in 1950. "There's this old quote," Newman told us, "I will never be beyond the whisper of my father's voice."

Certainly, while his father was alive, Newman listened to that whisper of respectability. He joined the navy in the Second World War (he was rejected as a pilot because of colour blindness), got married (to first wife Jackie Witte), had children and even agreed to inherit the store when his father's health failed.

But Newman's days as a shopkeeper were short-lived, and it wasn't long before he and his young family moved on -- to Connecticut, where he studied drama at Yale, and in New York, where he debuted on Broadway as an understudy in William Inge's Picnic, alongside future wife Woodward.

Newman and Woodward's 50-year marriage was a freakish anomaly in Hollywood, one that rode out good times and bad (the worst of the latter being the overdose death of Newman's son, Scott, in 1978). He directed her to a best-actress Oscar nomination in Rachel, Rachel (adapted from Margaret Laurence's A Jest Of God). He would direct five more movies -- all but one of them (his adaptation of Ken Kesey's Sometimes A Great Notion) featuring his wife.

'BOLT OF LIGHTNING'

But Newman, who according to pal Redford had "the attention span of a bolt of lightning," gave up directing in the 1980s, just about the time his acting career was kicking in again. Then he won his Oscar.

As per Dylan Thomas, Newman did "not go gentle into that good night." Look no further than his offscreen career as a racecar driver -- one that actually alarmed some race officials as he approached age 80.

When I talked to him in 1994, on the eve of the release of his Oscar-nominated turn in Nobody's Fool, he had crashed in his past three races and swore that the next would be his last.

A few months later, Newman and his Newman/Haas team won that race, at Daytona, setting a Guinness Book record for the oldest driver to win a professionally sanctioned race.

So all bets were off, and he carried on his racing career.

"I'm a very competitive person, and I always have been," he said at the Cars press conference. "And it's hard to be competitive about something as amorphous as acting. But you can be competitive in racing because the rules are very simple, and the declaration of a winner is very concise."

His last race was in 2005, in a Fabcar Porsche Daytona prototype that Disney-Pixar sponsored at the Rolex 24 At Daytona for the team of Newman, Michael Brockman, and Champ Car champions Sebastien Bourdais and Cristiano da Matta. The team suffered mechanical problems and finished 51st.

But "finished" was not a word Newman ever used. He vowed in 2006 to race again, "with the blessing of my patient wife, and I will continue until at some point I embarrass myself."

But good sense -- or his wife -- prevailed, and Newman never raced again (except in a go-kart on Jay Leno's Tonight Show).

Newman was, after all, Nobody's Fool.