It was not just that Paul Newman was a great actor, or that he was handsome, or was born with eyes as blue as the Aegean and a smile you could warm your hands on, or an award-winning director and champion racing car driver. It was not that he was a political activist who took pride in earning a berth on Richard Nixon's enemies list.

Nor even that through his quiet philanthropy he raised hundreds of millions of dollars for charities through his Newman's Own Foundation. Or that he stayed married to Joanne Woodward for 50 years in an industry where most marriages have the shelf life of fresh milk (“I have steak at home,” he quipped when asked if was ever tempted to stray. “Why go out for hamburger?”)

It was that Paul Newman managed to do all these things while maintaining his dignity, his privacy and his integrity. He was, in the words of his friend Gore Vidal, “a man of conscience”.

The art of dressing is to buy well-made clothes and then to wear them matter-of-factly, as if they just happened to be the first things that came to hand that morning. It's much the same with beauty and talent. Newman had both in spades. Yet he wore them so lightly that he never let them weigh him down or crease his career.

Newman recognised that mysterious, transforming power of Hollywood fame characterised by Billy Wilder as: “One day you are a signature, next day you're an autograph.” He spent much of his life straining to inoculate himself against it.

But he could do nothing to stop audiences falling for him. He played an outlaw in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the pool shark Fast Eddie in The Hustler, a con man in The Sting, a prisoner in Cool Hand Luke, a dirty hockey player in Slap Shot, and he was unappealingly selfish in the title role of Hud. Audiences loved him regardless.

However wicked the baddie was that Newman was playing, audiences still swooned when he appeared on screen. Chances are that, if Paul Newman mugged you in the street, you'd apologise for not having enough cash in your wallet.

In an era of fame debased by I'll-remember-their-name-in-a-minute celebrities, Newman was an old-school Hollywood star. Yet he never took himself too seriously. Describing himself, he said: “He is generally considered by professionals to be the worst fisherman on the East Coast”. Self-effacing almost to the point of being embarrassed about his success, he attributed much of it to what he called “Newman's luck”.

He once said of this luck that: “It's allowed me to take chances, to take risks”. It also explains something of what has fuelled his philanthropic energy. “I wanted to acknowledge luck. The beneficence of it in many lives and the brutality of it in the lives of others, especially children, who might not have a lifetime to make up for it.”

But just as he questioned his own acting skill by joking that his epitaph would read, “Here lies Paul Newman who died a failure because his eyes turned brown”, Newman milked his fame while also mocking it by marketing his Newman's Own salad dressing under the motto: “Shameless exploitation for the common good.”

Cary Grant, asked how he managed to live up to his dazzling image, replied: “We all wish we were Cary Grant. Sometimes I wish I was Cary Grant.” Is there not a part of all of us that wishes that we were Paul Newman? He showed it was possible to a be a celebrity without losing dignity.