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Paul Newman, the Oscar-winning superstar who personified cool as the anti-hero of such films as “Hud,” “Cool Hand Luke” and “The Color of Money” - followed by a second act as an activist, race car driver and popcorn impresario - has died. He was 83.

Newman died Friday at his farmhouse near Westport following a in extent battle with cancer, publicist Jeff Sanderson said. He was surrounded by means of his family and terminate friends.

In May, Newman dropped plans to direct a fall production of “Of Mice and Men” at Connecticut’s Westport Country Playhouse, citing unspecified hale condition issues. The following month, a friend disclosed that he was being treated for cancer and Martha Stewart, besides a friend, posted photos on her Web site of Newman looking gaunt at a milk of human kindness luncheon.

But true to his fiercely private nature, Newman remained cagey on the eve his condition, reacting to reports that he had lung cancer with a narration saying only that he was “doing nicely.”

As an tragedian, Newman got his start in theater and on television during the 1950s, and went on to be turned into one of the world’s most enduring and popular film stars, a legend held in awe by his peers. He was nominated for Academy Awards 10 state of things, winning one Oscar and two honorary ones, and had greater roles in other than 50 motion pictures, including “Exodus,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Verdict,” “The Sting” and “Absence of Malice.”

Newman worked with some of the greatest directors of the past half century, from Alfred Hitchcock and John Huston to Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers. His co-stars included Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Bacall, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks and, most famously, Robert Redford, his sidekick in “Butch Cassidy” and “The Sting.”

“There is a point where feelings go exceeding altercation,” Redford said Saturday. “I have lost a real friend. My the vital spark - and this population - is better for his being in it.”

Newman sometimes teamed with his wife and fellow Oscar winner, Joanne Woodward, with whom he had one of Hollywood’s rare long-term marriages. “I have steak at home, why go lacking for hamburger?” Newman told Playboy magazine at the confinement that asked if he was tempted to stray.

They wed in 1958, around the same time they both appeared in “The Long Hot Summer.” Newman furthermore directed her in several films, including “Rachel, Rachel” and “The Glass Menagerie.”

With his strong, classically plentiful face and piercing blue eyes, Newman was a heartthrob just as likely to play against his looks, becoming a favorite through critics in quest of his convincing portrayals of rebels, tough guys and losers. New York Times critic Caryn James wrote back his turn as the town curmudgeon in 1995’s “Nobody’sitting Fool” that “you never stop to wonder how a shore as good-looking as Paul Newman ended up this manner.”

“Sometimes God makes holy people,” fellow “Absence of Malice” star Sally Field said, “and Paul Newman was one of them.”

Newman had a soft locality for underdogs in real life, giving tens of millions to charities through his provender company and setting up camps as being severely ill children. Passionately adverse to the Vietnam War, and in patronize of civil rights, he was so famously liberal that he ended up on President Nixon’session “enemies list,” one of the actor’s proudest achievements, he liked to say.