In Twilight, his 61st and latest film, Paul Newman plays an ageing, slightly doddering, wryly cynical, stony-faced detective who wears his life's journey on his face. In reality, Paul Newman is a 73-year-old, very slightly doddering, wryly cynical, stony-faced but kindly grandfather who wears every character he has ever played on his face, from Hud to The Hudsucker Proxy. He is still a very beautiful man, slim, fit and at five foot six inches, smaller than you expect - as icons often are.
"Mute" is the word that Susan Sarandon's character uses to describe the Newman character's scanty use of language in Twilight, a thriller about the corruption of Hollywood. Mute? Well, almost. Newman himself speaks haltingly and reluctantly, and apologises for not being "charming and witty". This aloofness, it turns out, is due to a genuine shyness and insecurity, rather than arrogance. This seems unbelievable for a man who must know he is a twentieth century icon. He will answer with silence if he thinks it appropriate, although he has a winning eagerness to talk about almost anything - except the film business. For a Hollywood star, the man does a pretty good imitation of somebody who never made a film.
Ask him about films or acting or actors, and the response will be a cliff-hanger pause, accompanied by that famous, intimidating, piercing stare, although the blue eyes have faded a little. The stare is followed by a neat, slowly paced and finely-edited answer, which you lap up with gratitude.
"I was always a very private person and I'm becoming even more private . . . I'm enjoying film-making less and less," he says.
Ask him about popcorn, however, and his face brightens, enlivening a bitterly cold, dark afternoon at Barretstown Castle, where we sit on the landing by a window overlooking the rolling hills of Co Kildare.
On the subject of popcorn, he becomes so animated and unselfconscious that you could listen to him talk about popcorn all day, with those mesmerising eyes twinkling at you.
The man is obsessed with the science of popcorn: how to air-pop it, how big it pops, how to shrink it by baking it, how to flavour it. He tinkers with his recipes until they're perfect.
"After it's popped, if you bake it for about an hour and 20 minutes at 220 degrees (F), it's chewier and crispier and more flavourful and really corny," he says with a lick of his lips and a sexy wink.
As he describes his methods, he uses his index finger and thumb to show you the exact size of an ordinary kernel of puffed-up popcorn compared with a smaller nugget of his favourite, tiny, black kernels of "strawberry" popcorn. He describes the butter melting in the pan; he waxes lyrical about popcorn until you wish you had a bowl of it right there and then. I've been craving it every since.
"A bowl of popcorn, a six-pack of Budweiser and a good book - that's heaven," he says.
He enjoys talking politics, and has invested in the left-wing political magazine, The Nation. "I didn't leave my citizenship behind when I became an actor," he says. Bill Clinton, as a Yale student, was Newman's chauffeur during the Senate campaign of Democrat Joe Duffy, whom Newman was supporting at the time. "Bill volunteered for Duffy and he drew me, then complained bitterly that all he did was drive six blocks and pick up another pack of Budweiser," Newman says with a straight face.
"Clinton won't be impeached, but they will make him bleed. It's short-sighted, detrimental to the long-term of goals of the country; it is partisan and lunatic."
He shrugs when you ask him how he spends his days, then volunteers that he enjoys "getting into cars and trashing them", and that he likes inventing things, such as a pair of reading glasses that doesn't steam up in a sauna. "I'm probably a better inventor than I am an actor," he says.
"I invent myself every morning when I wake up. I ask myself, who are you going to be today? I think when you are an actor it's a big temptation. It's a compulsion, really. I think it's very unconscious thing that we actors do. I think people develop successful mannerisms as characters in films. These characters attach themselves to the host. I have the body, and they attach themselves to me in such an insidious way that you don't ever really know when you are doing them."
Newman's core contradiction seems to be that while he has incorporated many of his acting roles into his personality and mannerisms, and his behaviour is quite self-conscious, at the same time he wants to be seen as a normal person, rather than a star. He lives the life of a salesman. He is a slightly eccentric salesman, you must admit, and his life on the road involves private jets and limos rather than rental cars and cheap hotel rooms. But when you come right down to it, he hasn't turned out to be that different from the businessman he was destined to be, growing up in the shadow of his affluent family's sporting goods business in Cleveland, Ohio. Even he is surprised.
"In the past, I never understood the rush or the attraction of business. Now that I'm out there hustling spaghetti sauce I relish the cut-throat business of it. We increased our sales by 20 per cent this year," he says proudly.
He also hustles microwave popcorn, salad dressings and salsa dips, with the profits going to charity. By the end of next year, Newman's Own products will have made a total profit for charity of $100 million since 1986. "If I'd known I'd be this good at business, I'd have kept the money for myself," he jokes.
About 2,800 projects have benefited, among them the Barretstown Gang Camp in Co Kildare, where children aged seven to 16 from throughout Europe visit to be transformed from "patients" into "kids". The notion that children with cancer, blood disorders such as haemophilia and paediatric AIDS could have their lives enhanced by a summer camp of "therapeutic recreation", including theatre, creative writing and "dickying about in the woods", as Newman describes it, has been his most successful sell.
Today there are six Gang camps, including Barretstown and L'Envol in France, where sick children and their siblings enjoy cunningly designed adventure playgrounds which give the feeling of risk-taking, while ensuring success. There is one counsellor for each two children and in the background, a 24-hour, top-class medical team unobtrusively monitors the children's health.
"The camps work because the illness is not the exception, it's the rule," says Newman. "So if there's nothing that they have to hide, the kids can be recreated as normal kids because they are relating to other kids who have the same thing. They can be ordinary and raise hell and behave badly. They arrive alone and leave with an extraordinary family."
Newman drops in on the camps regularly and has visited Barretstown six times in the past five years. "Whenever you really feel crappy and rotten about something on your community or in politics or whatever, this is the place you can come to find comfort in. Because this place - and these people who make this place happen - is the best. If you want to find some place to get refuelled, this is the place to be doing it . . . The most extraordinary thing about these places is that there's a circularity. A reciprocity. The children come here as the intended beneficiaries, and the people who benefit as much as the children are the volunteers," he says.
The question of why Newman identifies with children with cancer, is a fascinating one, but he says he hasn't thought much about it. There is an obvious parallel, however, in the fact that Newman is a shy icon who feels trapped by his cinematic image and is constantly searching for environments in which he can be Paul Normal, just another guy. Maybe this is why he identifies with sick children who are segregated by illness from the normal world and trapped in their roles as patients, when all they want to be is "just another kid".
"That may be so," he answers, thoughtfully, to this suggestion, but he's not a man who indulges in self-analysis.
Newman started Barretstown in 1994 with a £2 million donation, after his friend, Peter O'Toole, suggested that the Victorian castle, which looks like a film-set, would be a perfect location for the first European camp. But it's a myth that Barretstown is rolling in money. It has to fundraise at least £2 million annually just to survive, because Newman believes that the project must be sustainable within Ireland.
"We want to increase our capacity, we need a sports centre. Everyone thinks we are very rich and yet we are not very rich at all. We can't support this camp from abroad. It mustn't be a satellite of something in the States. The thing that sustains a place like this is really the support of the community."
Barretstown has raised £12.5 million since it 1994, but it must raise a further £2.5 million by the end of 1999 in order to develop. The Barretstown board, which is chaired by Ron Bolger, senior partner of KPMG and chairman of Telecom Eireann, has an ambitious fund-raising target of an additional £20 million over the next six years.
Newman is driven to publicise his charity projects - gladly breaking a London holiday with his wife last Sunday to fly to Baldonnel by private jet just to spend three hours at Barretstown - but he insists that he is not driven by any trauma in his own life. "I woke up one morning in 1986 with the idea in my head," he says. "It was just the recognition of how lucky I was and how unlucky some other kids can be."
Newman says that the death from a drugs and alcohol overdose in 1978 of his only son, Scott Newman, an actor who had made four films, did not inspire his charity work, although he did set up the Scott Newman Foundation, which combats substance abuse. On his feelings about the death, Newman says, simply: "It's not something you recover from. I don't think you ever do."
When asked about his daughters, Newman freely mentions all five of them, the three he has with Joanne Woodward, whom he married in 1958, and the two he had with Jackie Witte, to whom he was married from 1949 to 1958. Asked who his best friends are, he answers "Joanne and my daughters".
Of his three daughters with Woodward, one runs a charity, Pegasus, which uses horse-riding as therapy with mentally and/or physically disabled children, another is in the organic food business (recently launching a biscuit called Fig Newmans), and a third is a full-time mother. His two daughters with Witte are also socially aware like their father: one works in social welfare and the other works with a substance abuse programme.
Newman's charity work and his 40-year marriage, almost freakish in Hollywood terms, have given him a saintly reputation. "This image that I'm Mr Goody-Two-Shoes is completely wrong. When I go to that great rehearsal hall in the sky and the book is written in terms of the graceful and the disgraceful, I'll probably be right in the middle of it with everybody else," he says.
The interview is ending, and suddenly we're back to spaghetti sauce. "If you want a really good sauce, you add stuff to it. You take a jar of Sockerooni, saute some peppers - some yellow ones, some red ones - throw in some black olives, some capers and - most important, crumbled fried bacon. We're doing ice cream now, too . . ." The life of a salesman is that he never stops selling.
For information on donating to Barretstown Gang Camp, email: info@barretstowngc.ie or www.Barretstowngc.ie. Telephone: 045 864115