Mondello Race Track, August 17, 2004. I can hear Irish multi millionaire Michael Smurfit's helicopter landing on the helipad. I'd met Smurfit at the Marbella Ball a few weeks before and I am not pushed about meeting him again. I am much more interested in meeting Paul Newman.

Who, in their right mind, wouldn't be?

He is in a big room with family and friends having lunch. The PR brings me in to meet him. I am nervous at meeting someone I have admired all my life. Sensing my nerves, he laughs at my stupid joke about whether he is going to eat 50 eggs for lunch (a reference to his character's bet in Cool Hand Luke). He laughs, shooting me a friendly Butch Cassidy grin. "I didn't eat one of the eggs," he smiles. "Henry Fonda showed me how to look like I was eating them." Newman then does an impeccable impersonation of Fonda.

It is impossible to talk to Paul Newman without the subject of his films quickly surfacing. He claims not to care unduly about stardom and the movies that made him such a name over all the world. He was once the young all-American Caesar -- the new Brando -- having studied the Method at the Actors' Studio in New York under Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan. He had the world at his feet and, unlike Brando, he didn't throw it all away.

Who could forget his performance in The Hustler? The way his body falls when he catches sight of Piper Laurie after she commits suicide?

Or as juvenile delinquent turned boxer Rocky Graziano, who becomes world champion in Somebody up There Likes Me? Or that performance with Liz Taylor in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? After Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire had put Brando opposite Vivien Leigh, it was a masterstroke that saw Brando's nemesis, Newman, opposite Taylor as a moody alcoholic ex-football star intent on wrecking his marriage in a dysfunctional southern family.

"They were just great scripts," he says. "The writing was great."

But you chose to do those movies . . .

"I was lucky," says Newman, for 50 years the one true male American movie icon who cannot be ignored. "That's all it was. Luck."

Those unforgettable blue eyes still have their powerful magnetism. Outside, the whole world seems to want to peek in to get a better look at one of the world's most enduringly famous actors (will anyone remember Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks in 50 years?). TV3's Lorraine Keane, with her beautiful face practically up against the pane, appears singularly smitten.

Perhaps echoing Miss Kean's desire, Linda Fiorentino once told Vogue about Newman thus: "He's about the only one I could think of that I would have sex with -- if he weren't married -- even if he were in his 90s."

Inside the veiled windows, 79-year-old Newman makes no grand claims for himself and seems embarrassed by all the attention, not to mention all the grub.

Almost everything he does has a cultural charge. When he remarks on the music playing outside, I'm immediately thinking of the hymn he picked out on his banjo after receiving news of his mother's death in Cool Hand Luke.

The burger he's delicately picking at puts me in mind of his famous quote about why he was never tempted to stray from his beautiful wife, Joanne Woodward: "Why go out for hamburger when you have steak at home?"

I mention that I'd read somewhere that he had said one of his sauces had aphrodisiacal qualities. Would he care to name which one? He laughs and says I'll just have to keep trying all of them, like the children in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory looking for the Wonka bars with the elusive five golden tickets.

In many ways, Paul Leonard Newman, born on January 26, 1925, in Shaker Heights, Cleveland, found the golden ticket more than 50 years ago when he met Joanne Woodward in 1953. He was then married to actress Jackie Witt, but when the couple divorced he married Woodward in 1958.

It has been said that Newman, with his matinee-idol good looks, could have rivalled Warren Beatty as the movie world's most pronounced playboy, but instead Newman decided to become the other half of Hollywood's most enduring marriage.

What is the secret of your marriage to Joanne, Paul?

"We have never hit each other so hard that we had to leave," he smiles. Just in case we get lost in translation, Paul's best friend Bob Forrester explains later what the actor meant: "He's just saying, 'We've had our differences, like anybody else has had their differences'."

Newman, it transpires, possesses a wit drier than the Mojave desert. He denies that age brings wisdom. "Wrinkles", he says. In the Vanity Fair Proust Questionnaire some years ago, Newman excelled in minimalist humour: What is your greatest extravagance? "Two ties." What is the quality you most like in a woman? "No ties." What is the quality you most like in a man? "Two ties".

Newman -- who isn't wearing a tie today -- recalls one day a decade or so ago, driving into his driveway on his birthday, and seeing what looked like a Porsche in the garage. On closer inspection, he discovered that the Porsche had been meticulously wrecked by someone who obviously thought it was a great wheeze. Then the penny -- or the dime -- dropped. Newman suddenly knew the identity of the practical joker.

"Redford did this to me! He left this here!" Naturally, Newman would have his revenge.

He waited for his co-star in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to leave town. Then he had the Porsche compacted, took it over to Redford's house, and left it right in the middle of the living room. Newman ruefully admitted that he lost the battle, because Redford never acknowledged finding the car. Every time he met up with Redford, Newman would ask him, "Anything new in your life, Bob?" hoping Redford would bring up the car. "Nothing," Bob would reply.

Then Redford finally admitted it two years ago on national US television. "He's a practical joker," says Bob Forrester. "We flew over to Dublin shortly after 9/11. It was a very difficult trip to make, because it was about four days after 9/11 and we were obligated to come over to Barretstown. We were on a private plane. I woke up to put on my shoes, and someone had put grapes in them!"

"My father is a very funny, loving, decent man," says Clea Newman. (I mentioned to her later how happy I am to have met her father and how the other American I would like to have met was Elvis Presley.) "My mother is the same," Clea says of Joanne Woodward. "She adored Elvis as well. She met him once." Alas, Newman's personal assistant said I was not to ask his daughter, who appeared happy to speak, any more family questions.

Everybody loves Paul Newman, I say, trying to win myself the Order of the Brown Nose. Mercifully, Newman and his coterie have the good sense to disagree.

"Dick Cheney probably doesn't love him!" says Bob, as Paul roars with laughter. "There are people who clearly don't. Like any individual, you have different parts of your life. The political side with Paul is a very liberal person."

He believes one of his "proudest achievements" is not so much the three Oscars he's received, but being placed on Richard Nixon's notorious Enemies List. He was No 19. He also talks proudly about his father, about the Depression in America and his father's experience of it.

With his personal assistant eyeing me as if I was a recalcitrant child who won't behave, I ask him how his late father would have felt about the way America has gone over the past few years.

"He would have been disturbed by how much wealth is controlled by so few, and how the middle class of America is being diminished and how poverty is ignored," he says.

Newman's father, it transpires, would have had good reason to be proud of his son.

In the early Eighties, Newman founded a food company -- Newman's Own -- that contributes 100 per cent of its after-tax profits to charity.

An incredible $190m (€130m) has been donated by Newman's Own to charities around the world.

Then there is the fact that he puts his considerable weight -- emotional, financial and otherwise -- behind the brilliant Barretstown project in Ballymore Eustace, Co Kildare, which he founded 10 years ago (its precursor was Newman's famous Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in the US).

He would probably swallow his burger the wrong way if you described him as a do-gooder. He defines the philosophy that underpins his charity work not as self-serving "philanthropy" but like "a farmer putting back into the soil he has taken out of".

"It is just an acknowledgement of luck. That's all. That's the fall-out from it, but what it really acknowledges is good luck. The good luck in my life and the bad luck in the lives of some of the kids," he says.

There are a lot of people in your position in Hollywood who do absolutely sweet FA.

"I'm more surprised by the people who don't than by the people who do," he says. "So I don't take any special credit for it. People do what they want to do."

But you wanted to do it. "How high on the hog do you have to live?" he says, raising his voice passionately. "If you're living high enough to satisfy all normal purposes, what can you do with the rest? Bury it?"

(At this deep moment of truth about the nature of existence Dr Smurfit is ushered into the room by the PR who, not realising I have met and not exactly hit it off with Smurfit in Spain recently, introduces me to him. With Newman watching, Smurfit can hardly flounce out. He gives me a wet lettuce handshake and arranges to see Paul later.)

Doubtless Newman's sense of "there but for the grace of God go I" owes a lot to being at the mercy of fate in the three years he served in the US Navy Air Corps during the Second World War. ("Luck. That philosophy came from a lot of different places," explains Bob Forrester, who served in Vietnam. "Some of it came from his experience in WWII, sure. Anybody who's been in a war, you always say, 'How did I come back and somebody else didn't come back?' The only answer to that is, 'Luck'.")

As someone who has seen the horrors of war up close, how does Newman think the problems in Iraq will be solved? He looks at me for a second. "Iraq has a life of its own because the Iraqis will ultimately have to decide that. It is going to come from within, not from without," he says.

What's the biggest misconception people have about you?

"That I'm an intrinsically decent person," he answers, laughing. So you're a complete bastard then? Newman and his daughter crack up.

Then, the hippest almost-octogenarian on Planet Earth asks me if I'd like to come for a spin around Mondello in his red Porsche.

My luncheon companion is a four-time winner of the Sports Club of America National Championship and is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest person to win the Rolex 24-hour endurance race (a record he set at Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1995), but I didn't want to trust luck that day.

I have, I am ashamed to admit, a terrible hangover, and I am frightened what I might do in his Porsche.

I cry off, citing being a terrible scaredy-cat. Two minutes later, with Michael Smurfit waiting for him in a private suite, Newman has his foot to the floor, doing about 180mph around the track.

- Barry Egan