Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn paid tribute to late writer Norman Mailer at a memorial service in New York on Wednesday night.

The Mystic River star hailed Mailer, who died of renal failure at the age of 84 in November (07), as an example of the kind of man people should dream of becoming.

Penn told the Carnegie Hall gathering, "The sentence 'Norman Mailer is dead' is a lament for what greatness once was, and for what greatness should aspire to."

Two thousand people, including author Tina Brown and Mailer's widow Norris Church Mailer, packed into the venue to pay their respects to the Pulitzer Prize winner.