Academy Award-winning actor Paul Newman passed away on Friday after a battle with cancer. He was 83 years old.

Newman was nominated for 10 Academy Awards during his lifetime and he finally won a Best Actor trophy for reprising his role as Eddie Felson in 1986's The Color of Money.The Academy also awarded Newman the Honorary Award in 1986 and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1994.

In addition to acting, Newman was an avid racing enthusiast and he also donated to charity thanks to his "Newman's Own" line of spaghetti sauces and salad dressings.

Newman made his last on-screen appearance opposite Tom Hanks in Road to Perdition before providing the voice of Doc Hudson in Pixar's Cars.

Paul Leonard Newman (January 26, 1925 – September 26, 2008)was an American actor, film director, entrepreneur, humanitarian and auto racing enthusiast. He won numerous awards, including an Academy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Cannes Film Festival Award, and an Emmy award, along with many honorary awards. He also won several national championships as a driver in Sports Car Club of America road racing and his race teams won several championships in open wheel IndyCar racing. He was also the founder of Newman's Own, a food company from which Newman donated all profits and royalties to charity. As of May 2007, these donations have exceeded US$220 million.[3] On September 26, 2008, Newman died at his long-time home in Westport, Connecticut succumbing to complications arising from lung cancer.

Newman was one of the few actors who successfully made the transition from 1950s cinema to that of the 1960s and 1970s. His rebellious persona translated well to a subsequent generation. Newman starred in Exodus (1960), The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963), Harper (1966), Hombre (1967), Cool Hand Luke (1967), The Towering Inferno (1974), Slap Shot (1977) and The Verdict (1982). He teamed with fellow actor Robert Redford and director George Roy Hill for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973).

He appeared with his wife, Joanne Woodward, in the feature films The Long, Hot Summer (1958), Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!, (1958), From the Terrace (1960), Paris Blues (1961), A New Kind of Love (1963), Winning (1969), WUSA (1970), The Drowning Pool (1975), Harry & Son (1984) and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990). They also both starred in the HBO miniseries Empire Falls, but did not have any scenes together.

In addition to starring in and directing Harry & Son, Newman also directed four feature films (in which he did not act) starring Woodward. They were Rachel, Rachel (1968), based on Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God, the screen version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972), the television screen version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Shadow Box (1980) and a screen version of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (1987).

25 years after "The Hustler", Newman reprised his role of "Fast" Eddie Felson in the Martin Scorsese directed The Color of Money (1986) for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Last works

In 2003, he appeared in a Broadway theatre revival of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. He received his first Tony Award nomination for his performance. PBS and the cable network Showtime aired a taping of the production, and Newman was nominated for an Emmy Award, for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie.

His last screen appearance was as a conflicted mob boss in the 2002 film Road to Perdition opposite Tom Hanks, although he continued to provide voice work for films. In keeping with his strong interest in car racing, he provided the voice of Doc Hudson, a retired race car in Disney/Pixar's Cars. Similarly, he served as narrator for the 2007 film Dale, about the life of the legendary NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt.

Retirement from acting

Newman announced that he would entirely retire from acting on May 25, 2007. He stated that he didn't feel he could continue acting on the level that he would want to. "You start to lose your memory, you start to lose your confidence, you start to lose your invention. So I think that's pretty much a closed book for me."[