I once worked in Westport, Conn., the artsy, upscale town that Paul Newman called home for almost 50 years. Whenever I asked a resident about the actor with the world’s most famous blue eyes, I got the same answer.

“He acts like a regular guy,” I was told. “You’d never know he was famous.”

Newman, of course, was far from a regular guy, even though he had a fondness for beer, fast cars and practical jokes. He led an extraordinary life, not only as an actor but as a philanthropist, race-car driver, entrepreneur and partner in one of Hollywood’s most celebrated marriages.

In Paul Newman: A Life, a readable but somewhat shallow biography, Shawn Levy details Newman’s accomplishments and frailties without falling prey to hagiography or trashy sensationalism.

Along with Newman’s distinguished movies and charitable activities, Levy discusses his excessive drinking, failed first marriage, guilt over his only son’s early death and affair with a journalist during the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Levy never spoke to Newman, who declined his requests, so he had to rely on previously published quotes and his own interviews with about 50 of Newman’s acquaintances and friends.

Newman’s absence is both a strength and a weakness. While I’m sure he would have added some entertaining anecdotes, his lack of participation forced Levy to do additional legwork and provide his own slant on the actor’s career.

The son of a Cleveland sporting-goods store owner, Newman grew up in a comfortable suburb with his Jewish father, Christian Science mother and older brother Arthur. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he attended Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where he acted in school dramas, toiled as a practice-squad football player and was arrested in the aftermath of a drunken nightclub brawl.

Newman appeared in several Broadway shows before making his film debut in The Silver Chalice, a cheesy historical epic in which he played a Greek artist. (Years later, when the film was scheduled to air on TV, Newman took out a newspaper ad urging people not to watch.)

Critics compared him to Marlon Brando, and the bomb hardly put a crimp in his budding film career. After making his breakthrough as boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), Newman quickly became a star who eventually earned nine Oscar nominations. (He won only once, for Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money.)

Levy, film critic for the Oregonian, gives a fairly stock account of Newman’s films. The book picks up steam when it talks about Newman’s off-screen life, including his 50-year marriage to Joanne Woodward, whom he wed after divorcing his first wife, Jackie. (He had three children with each wife.)

The most salacious tidbit is Levy’s brief account of Newman’s affair with Nancy Bacon, a journalist assigned to cover the making of Butch Cassidy. Bacon wrote about the relationship in her 1975 autobiography, so Levy isn’t breaking new ground here. Bacon claims she dumped Newman because he “was always drunk.” We don’t know Newman’s version because he never talked about it publicly.

Whatever happened, his marriage to Woodward lasted until he died of cancer on Sept. 26, 2008. He outlived his son, Scott, by 30 years. Scott struggled in his father’s shadow, never making it as an actor or singer, before dying of an accidental drug overdose at the age of 28.

“Scott and I had simply lost the ability to help each other,” Newman said.

Newman was able to help many others through his Hole in the Wall camps for seriously ill children and more than $250 million in charitable donations from his Newman’s Own line of food products. He also lobbied for liberal political causes and candidates, earning him a spot on Richard Nixon’s enemies list.

For all his fame and fortune, nothing gave Newman more pleasure than hanging out with the kids at his summer camps.

“If I’m going to leave a legacy, it’s not going to be my films or anything I do politically,” he said. “It’s going to be these camps.”

Paul Newman is published by Harmony (490 pages, $29.99).