The winner of two Oscars, he was hailed for his nuanced performances in films like The French Connection, Unforgiven and The Royal Tenenbaums.
Gene Hackman, who never fit the mould of a Hollywood movie star but became one all the same, playing seemingly ordinary characters with deceptive subtlety, intensity and often charm in some of the most noted films of the 1970s and ’80s, has died, authorities in New Mexico said Thursday. He was 95.
Hackman and his wife were found dead Wednesday afternoon at a home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they had been living, according to a statement from the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department. The cause of death was unclear and under investigation. Sheriff’s deputies found the bodies of Hackman; his wife, Betsy Arakawa, 64; and a dog, according to the statement, which said that foul play was not suspected.
Hackman was nominated for five Academy Awards and won two during a 40-year career in which he appeared in films seen and remembered by millions, among them Bonnie and Clyde, The French Connection, The Poseidon Adventure, Mississippi Burning, Unforgiven, Superman, Hoosiers and The Royal Tenenbaums.
The familiar characterisation of Hackman was that he was Hollywood’s perfect Everyman. But perhaps that was too easy. His characters – convict, sheriff, Klansman, steelworker, spy, minister, war hero, grieving widower, submarine commander, basketball coach, president – defied pigeonholing, as did his shaded portrayals of them.
Still, he did not deny that he had a regular-Joe image, nor did he mind it. He once joked that he looked like “your everyday mine worker”. And he did seem to have been born middle-aged: slightly balding, with strong but unremarkable features neither plain nor handsome, a tall man (6 foot 2) more likely to melt into a crowd than stand out in one.
It was Hackman’s gift to be able to peel back the layers from characters who carried the weight of middle age.
“Because they’ve been around long enough to experience failure and loss, but not long enough to take it easy, Hackman could play them with a distinctive mix of shadow and light,” Jeremy McCarter wrote in an appraisal of Hackman’s career in Newsweek in 2010, six years after the release of what turned out to be his last film, the comedy Welcome to Mooseport, and two years after he confirmed that he did not plan to make any more movies.
“While some actors congratulate themselves for venturing into the moral grey zone,” McCarter continued, “Hackman has called it home for so long that we’ve ceased to notice. In his performances, as in life, the good guys aren’t always nice guys, and the villains have charm.”
If the critics had one word for Hackman as a performer, it was “believable”. He seemed to live his roles, they said, not play them.
“There’s no identifiable quality that makes Mr Hackman stand out,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times in 1988. “He simply makes himself outstandingly vital and real.”
He avoided self-analysis when he talked about acting. “I don’t like to look real deep at what I do with my characters,” he once said. “It is that strange fear that if you look at something too closely, it goes away.”
Hackman was forever associated with his breakout role: the crude, relentless narcotics cop Popeye Doyle – a grim-faced bloodhound in a porkpie hat – in the hit 1971 film The French Connection. That performance brought him his first Academy Award, as best actor.
But that was only one of countless memorable film portraits. He received an Oscar nomination for his work in Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988), in which he played an FBI agent investigating the disappearance of three civil rights workers – a “scratchy, rumpled, down-home-talking redneck, who himself has murder in his heart,” as Vincent Canby wrote in the Times.
In Unforgiven (1992), as a vicious small-town sheriff who crosses six-guns with a bounty hunter played by Clint Eastwood, he was a chilling study in sadistic brutality. That performance brought him his second Oscar, as Best Supporting Actor.
Early accolades
Early in his career, Hackman worked in television, on shows like Route 66 and Naked City, in improvisational theatre and in Broadway comedies, including Muriel Resnik’s Any Wednesday, with Sandy Dennis, and Jean Kerr’s Poor Richard, with Alan Bates and Joanna Pettet. His performance in a bit part in a 1964 Warren Beatty movie, Lilith, made a lasting impression on Beatty, who remembered him when he was producing Bonnie and Clyde and looking for someone to play Buck Barrow, the explosive brother of gangster Clyde Barrow (played by Beatty). Hackman’s performance in that film, directed by Arthur Penn and released in 1967, brought him his first Oscar nomination.
By the time director William Friedkin cast him in The French Connection, Hackman had more than a dozen films under his belt and a second supporting-actor Oscar nomination, for I Never Sang for My Father (1970), in which he played a widower coping with a demanding parent (played by Melvyn Douglas).
Not all his roles explored life’s dark side. His knack for comedy, honed on the stage, resurfaced in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1974), in which he had a cameo role as a blind hermit who unknowingly plays host to the monster, and served him well in later films like The Birdcage (1996) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).
By the mid-1970s, Hackman was making movies at such a pace that he became known as the hardest-working actor in Hollywood. In 1972 he appeared in three feature films, most notably The Poseidon Adventure, in which he played a minister trying to survive with other frantic passengers aboard a capsized ocean liner. (The other two were Prime Cut and Cisco Pike.) He repeated that trifecta in 1974 with Young Frankenstein, the Western Zandy’s Bride and The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola’s taut, understated drama about a surveillance expert who becomes involved in trying to prevent a murder.
His work in The Conversation was one of a string of critically acclaimed performances in the 1970s; among the others were his brawling ex-con in Scarecrow (1973) – which he considered the best performance of his career – and his troubled private eye in Night Moves (1975), in which he was reunited with Penn. But perhaps inevitably, given how many there were, his performances were often routine.
Hackman was making lots of money, but he was also wearing himself out. His return appearance as Popeye Doyle in French Connection II in 1975 was one of four Hackman films that were released that year. By the end of the decade, he decided he’d had enough for a while.
After playing Lex Luthor, nemesis of the Man of Steel, in Superman (1978) – and simultaneously filming his scenes for Superman II, released two years later – Hackman briefly left Hollywood. He did not make another film until All Night Long, a comedy co-starring Barbra Streisand, in 1981.
His streak of well-received performances soon resumed: as a high school basketball coach in search of redemption in Hoosiers (1986) and a government official who accidentally murders his mistress in No Way Out (1987); as a district attorney trying to protect a witness from two hit men in Narrow Margin (1990); and, in The Birdcage, a remake of the French comedy La Cage aux Folles, as a pompous conservative politician whose daughter’s fiance turns out to have two gay men, one of them a drag performer, as parents.
No slowing down
Even the heart surgery he underwent in 1990 did not slow his pace. In 2001, a year after turning 70, Hackman was seen in five films: the comedy The Heartbreakers, as a tobacco tycoon; Heist, David Mamet’s story of an elaborately planned robbery, as a master thief contemplating retirement; Behind Enemy Lines, as a naval chief trying to rescue a pilot shot down over Bosnia; The Mexican, a comedy adventure starring Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts, as an imprisoned mob boss; and Wes Anderson’s quirky The Royal Tenenbaums, as the absentee father of three prodigiously talented children.
That same year critic David Edelstein, writing in the Times, noted that unlike most actors of comparable stature, Hackman occupied “a middle ground between character acting and movie stardom”. He suggested one key to Hackman’s success: “Even at their jauntiest, Mr. Hackman’s performances have volcanic undercurrents. It might be that the secret of his uniqueness is that his comfort zone is such a scary and volatile place.”
Eugene Allen Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California, on January 30, 1930, and grew up in Danville, Illinois. His father, also named Eugene, was a pressman for the local newspaper. His mother, Anna Lyda (Gray) Hackman, was a server.
When young Gene was 13, his father abandoned the family, driving away while his son was out playing in the street. As his father passed by, Hackman recalled years later, he gave him a wave of the hand.
“I hadn’t realised how much one small gesture can mean,” he once said. “Maybe that’s why I became an actor.”
Lying about his age, he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1946 and served in China and then in Hawaii and Japan, at one point working as a disc jockey for his unit’s radio station. After his discharge, he studied journalism at the University of Illinois for six months and then went to New York to learn about television production.
He worked at local stations around the country before deciding to study acting, first in New York and then at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, where Dustin Hoffman was a fellow student. They struck up a lasting friendship, though they did not appear in a film together until 2003, when they were both in Runaway Jury, a courtroom drama based on a John Grisham novel.
Back in New York, Hackman met and married Faye Maltese, a bank secretary, and began the classic actor’s struggle to survive. “I drove a truck, jerked sodas, sold shoes,” he told an interviewer.
A Broadway hit
Eventually he found theatre work, first in summer stock and then off-Broadway. In Any Wednesday – his third Broadway play, but the first to last more than a few days – he played a young man from Ohio who goes to New York and falls in love with a tycoon’s mistress. The critics applauded, the play was a hit, and Hackman never had to sell another pair of shoes.
Hackman’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1986, after several trial separations. In 1991, he married Arakawa, a classical pianist, and they settled in Santa Fe. Survivors include three children from his first marriage, Christopher, Elizabeth and Leslie, and a granddaughter.
Hackman returned to the stage in 1992, opposite Glenn Close and Richard Dreyfuss in Mike Nichols’ production of Death and the Maiden, Ariel Dorfman’s play about a Latin American woman (Close) who succeeds in trapping the man (Hackman) she believes had raped and tortured her as a political prisoner years earlier. It was his first appearance on Broadway in 25 years; it was also his last.
In his later years, Hackman devoted much of his time to painting and sculpture at his adobe home in Santa Fe. He also became a published author. He collaborated with his friend Daniel Lenihan, an underwater archaeologist, on three historical novels, and later wrote Payback at Morning Peak (2011), a Western, and Pursuit (2013), a thriller.
He never formally retired from acting, but he told an interviewer in 2008 that he had given it up because he did not want to “keep pressing” and risk “going out on a real sour note”. Three years later, when an interviewer for GQ magazine told him, “You’ve got to do one more movie,” he said, “If I could do it in my own house, maybe, without them disturbing anything and just one or two people.”
In that same interview, Hackman was asked to sum up his life in a single phrase. He replied:
“He tried.” I think that’d be fairly accurate.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Robert Berkvist
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