When you watch movies, you’ll see actors and you’ll see stars, but you very rarely see anyone who can honestly be described as both. These individuals combine two very different sets of qualities: the nuanced thespian skills and talents that enable them to create characters who genuinely seem to live and breathe apart from the actor themselves, and the personal charisma, the indefinable “it,” that makes audiences naturally gravitate toward them. In my opinion, these individuals are becoming more and more rare all the time; I don’t know if they were a product of the old Hollywood system that died out in the ’70s or perhaps they had a certain kind of training that’s no longer much practiced, or maybe the planets just aren’t properly aligned these days, but for whatever reason, the younger people in movies today simply don’t have the same effortlessly larger-than-life aura about them.

We lost one of the last and greatest of these actor-stars Friday when the legendary Paul Newman succumbed at the age of 83 to the cancer he’s been rumored to have been battling for some time. This is one of those Hollywood deaths that I’ve been expecting, but which still strikes me to the bone. I can’t recall ever not knowing who Newman was; he’s always been one of my mother’s favorites, along with his occasional screen partner Robert Redford, and I have very dim memories of seeing The Sting with her when I was just a very small boy. (I can’t recall, however, if it was on TV or if my parents took me to the theater when it was first out. It seems like we saw it in the theater, but I may be imagining that.) Newman seemed like somebody I actually knew, and it hurts to think he’s gone.

The first thing you noticed about Newman was, of course, his looks. He’s always been one of my personal benchmarks for what makes a handsome man. His friend Redford truthfully isn’t aging very well, but Newman always remained alluring, right into old age. The last time I saw him on the big screen, in Sam Mendes’ Road to Perdition, his trademark blue eyes were undimmed and he still radiated power and vigor, despite his advancing years.

Still, there are lots of handsome men in Hollywood, and out in the regular world, too. Newman had the acting chops to set himself apart from the huge pack of pretty boys. A contemporary of Dean and Brando, he was nominated for the Best Acting Oscar eight times, although he won only once, for The Color of Money in 1986. A number of his movies are among my personal favorites, including The Hustler and the aforementioned Color of Money, which together form a fascinating peek at the same man 25 years apart. Also very special and meaningful to me personally, for reasons I won’t go into here, is the underrated and nearly forgotten film Blaze, from 1989. Newman plays a real historical figure, Earl K. Long, the irrascible governor of Louisiana who carried on an affair with the notorious stripper Blaze Starr in the 1950s. Initially brash and one of the biggest rascals you’ll ever see on film, Newman’s Long gradually reveals his vulnerability, his fears of growing old and irrelevant, and how loving this remarkable woman both ennobles him and weakens him. I always shed a tear at the end of this one, for the young man I used to be and the hard time he was enduring when Blaze came out as much as for the movie itself.

Probably, however, Newman is going to be best remembered for the pair of immensely popular movies he made with Redford, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting. It’s hard to believe they only made two movies together, because their pairing seems so natural and obvious. I’ve always hoped they would eventually find another project in which to share their easy-going chemistry.

Of the two, The Sting is my favorite, virtually the template to which all light-hearted con-artist/heist movies aspire. It never gets old for me. Butch and Sundance remains pleasurable, but I don’t think it’s quite as timeless. With its constant montage effects, leisurely pace, and sometimes meandering storyline, it feels very much like a product of the late ’60s, when movies were being made very differently than they are now. Still, it includes a lot of great moments, including the “I can’t swim” stunt, the haunting finale, and of course this one, which is surely one of the most joyful scenes in all of cinema:

If you can watch that without grinning even once, I’m sorry, but you’re dead inside. If I’d ever had a few seconds to speak with Paul Newman, I think I would’ve thanked him giving us that one moment out of a lifetime of good moments. I hope that would’ve pleased him. It’s not such a bad way to be remembered, after all, pedaling a bicycle around a field in the golden light of a young morning…