Gene Hackman, an actor who powerfully embodied ordinary men under stress in dozens of films and twice won Oscars for bringing humanizing depth to corrupt lawmen, from the raging cop in “The French Connection” to the ruthless sheriff in “Unforgiven,” was found dead Feb. 26 along with his wife at their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 95.
The city’s sheriff’s department said there was no immediate indication of foul play in the deaths of Mr. Hackman and Betsy Arakawa. The exact cause of death had not been determined.
A 6-foot-2 former Marine, Mr. Hackman was an imposing man with a curly nimbus of receding hair and a jowly potato face that he called “your everyday mine worker’s mug.” He was peerless at conveying frustration and throttled rage, but he showed glimmers of romantic warmth and a deft, if underused, comic flair. His onetime director and three-time co-star Warren Beatty praised his “broad spectrum of gifts, a combination of sensitivity and toughness.”
Undeniably charismatic, he rose to screen prominence at a moment when unconventional leading men — Dustin Hoffman, Elliott Gould, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino — were starting to populate the screen with more ethnic roles and working-class personas.
During a career that spanned 100 screen credits and four decades, Mr. Hackman amassed a rogues’ gallery of bullies, bigots and brooders. His finest roles showed an Everyman in conflict with himself and others and displayed his astonishing range as an actor capable of shades of intelligence, doubt, tenderness, cunning, fear and belligerence.
Such defining parts included the demanding Olympic skiing coach in “Downhill Racer” (1969); a middle-aged man battling his domineering father in “I Never Sang for My Father” (1970); and a surveillance expert ensnared in a conspiracy in the Watergate-era drama “The Conversation” (1974).
He also was a private eye investigating a missing girl and a labyrinth of sleaze in “Night Moves” (1975); a labor organizer in Beatty’s “Reds” (1981); an Indiana basketball coach pursuing a state championship in “Hoosiers” (1986); an FBI agent probing the disappearance of three civil rights workers in the 1960s in “Mississippi Burning” (1988); one of the sinister law partners in “The Firm” (1993); a comically low-rent movie producer in “Get Shorty” (1995); a shadowy tech whiz in “Enemy of the State” (1998); and the scheming head of a dysfunctional family in “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001).
In three installments of the crowd-pleasing “Superman” franchise — I, II and IV — he said he played the supervillain Lex Luthor mostly for the paycheck. But he said one of his favorite parts was the aggressively uncommercial road drama “Scarecrow” (1973), playing one of two vagabonds (the other was Pacino) who aspire to start a car-wash business. “It’s the only film I’ve ever made in absolute continuity,” he told Film Comment magazine, “and that allowed me to take all kinds of chances and really build my character.”
Mr. Hackman was perhaps best remembered for three of his most malevolent roles.
The first was “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), a gangster drama that broke taboos on screen violence. Mr. Hackman was cast as Buck Barrow, the older but overshadowed brother of the outlaw Clyde (Beatty) and his partner in crime, Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway).
New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael praised Mr. Hackman for his “beautifully controlled performance, the best in the film,” which was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including best picture. It also proved a massive hit with younger audiences and helped unleash a new era of bloody imagery in mainstream cinema. After years of little-seen but heralded stage and film work, he garnered his first of five Oscar nominations and was an overnight sensation at 37.
He won the best actor Academy Award for the thriller “The French Connection” (1971), playing a New York police detective who doggedly tracks a French heroin dealer. The modestly budgeted crime drama — a study in moral ambiguity as Mr. Hackman’s Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle is revealed to be as dirty, racist and reckless as he is obsessive about his quarry — became an unexpected box-office phenomenon thanks to one of the most harrowing, barreling-through-the streets chase sequences ever filmed.
“The French Connection,” which the American Film Institute ranks among the top 100 movies, won five Oscars, including for best picture and best director (William Friedkin). Mr. Hackman also starred in the wan sequel “The French Connection II” (1975), but those who worked with him over the years, including Beatty, noted that Mr. Hackman made indelible impressions even in some of Hollywood’s most forgettable features.
About 30 movies later, Mr. Hackman snared a best supporting actor trophy playing the pitiless Little Bill Daggett in the western “Unforgiven” (1992), directed by Clint Eastwood. Boston Herald film critic James Verniere branded Mr. Hackman’s performance “astoundingly real, a mass of warring impulses and noble intentions, half patriarch, half killer.”
Even when standing still, there was a sort of turbulence about Mr. Hackman — a constant, restless, undirected energy. In his youth — and well into his senior years — he was known for a quick temper, a demanding attitude and excessive habits. On sets, he was nicknamed “Vesuvius” for his volcanic anger. Mr. Hackman took responsibility for a minor West Hollywood traffic incident in 2001 that led to a full-on brawl: “He brushed against me, and I popped him.”
He remained a private person, quick to deflect any questions that demanded personal introspection. He was not an actor who strained over endless self-analysis, instead asking two questions of his characters — “How am I like this person?” and “How am I not like this person?” Discomfited by celebrity, he later shunned Hollywood and its trappings, and settled in New Mexico to write western novels.
“If you look at yourself as a star, you’ve already lost something in the portrayal of a human being,” he told the New York Times in 1989. “I need to keep myself on the edge and keep as pure as possible.”
An enigmatic gesture
His own inner peace was hard won. Eugene Alden (some sources say Allen) Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California, on Jan. 30, 1930. His father was an alcoholic newspaper pressman who moved the family to four states before settling in Danville, Illinois.
Mr. Hackman’s boyhood sanctuaries were a cardboard house next to a basement coal bin in which he hid out and the local movie house, where actors Errol Flynn, James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson were his heroes.
When Mr. Hackman was 13, his father walked out on the family with an enigmatic wave of the hand to his son playing in the street. “I knew from the wave that he wasn’t coming back,” he once said. “It was a real adios — like he was saying, ‘You’re on your own, kiddo.’ It was so precise. Maybe that’s why I became an actor.
“I doubt I would have become so sensitive to human behavior if that hadn’t happened to me as a child — if I hadn’t realized how much one small gesture can mean.”
The family moved in with his maternal grandmother, an unyielding Englishwoman who disapproved of him. “In high school, I was preternaturally shy,” he said. “I never had a single date.” At 16, after spending a night in jail for stealing candy and soda, he enlisted in the Marine Corps. (He lied about his age.) He was posted in Japan, Hawaii and China, where he read news updates and worked as a DJ on Armed Forces radio.
After his discharge, Mr. Hackman briefly studied journalism at the University of Illinois before dropping out and hitchhiking to Manhattan. He lived at the YMCA and attended art school under the GI Bill and, eventually, the School of Radio Technique.
He tried his hand at production in Florida and back in Danville before returning to New York. In 1956, he married his girlfriend, a bank secretary named Filipa “Faye” Maltese, and they headed for California and the Pasadena Playhouse.
According to showbiz lore, he was voted by Playhouse classmates — along with his friend and fellow bongo player Hoffman — least likely to succeed. Having resolved to prove them wrong, Mr. Hackman and his wife boarded a bus back to New York. He found work as an unpaid intern, building sets in summer stock on Long Island. In a two-week production of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” in 1957 — which starred the newcomer Robert Duvall — he was offered the one uncast role, Marco, a strong, silent Italian laborer.
That role led to work in off-Broadway shows and live television. He supplemented his meager income as a truck driver, a shoe salesman, a furniture polisher and a doorman at Howard Johnson’s in Times Square.
He recalled to interviewer Baird Jones: “Out of nowhere, this teacher I totally despised at the Pasadena Playhouse suddenly walked by HoJo’s and came right up into my face and shouted, ‘See, Hackman, I told you that you would never amount to anything!’ I felt 1 inch tall.”
Gradually, Mr. Hackman slowly won bigger parts and won critical plaudits in Muriel Resnik’s hit Broadway comedy “Any Wednesday” (1964), in which he portrayed a proper businessman who falls for a free-spirited woman, played by Sandy Dennis. A movie appearance that same year as a small-town husband in “Lilith” endeared Mr. Hackman to the star, Beatty, who later lobbied for him in “Bonnie and Clyde.”
“When I put him in ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ it was so he would make me good — I wasn’t that interested in him,” Beatty told Premiere magazine. “All I know is that it’s impossible for me to be bad in a scene with Gene Hackman.”
Becomes a star
“The French Connection” made Mr. Hackman a star. But subsequent roles in “actor’s movies” (“The Conversation,” “Scarecrow”) proved not to be audience favorites. “The Conversation,” written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, is widely considered Mr. Hackman’s pièce de résistance. His voyeuristic surveillance expert, Harry Caul, so fears an invasion of his privacy that he hollows himself out to an empty shell.
“’He was really a constipated character,” he told the New York Times of playing Caul. “But the misery was partially Coppola’s fault because he had let it be known that he wanted [Marlon] Brando for that role and Brando didn’t want to do it. I loved the idea of the role, but I also knew that I was second choice.”
By the mid-1970s, Mr. Hackman had more offers than anyone could reasonably handle. His choices were at times indiscriminate, and he appeared in enough lemons (“The Poseidon Adventure,” “Lucky Lady,” “March or Die”) to have qualified for the cash for clunkers program. “I just took anything that came around,” he said. “Part of me lost my artistic touch.”
Asked why he had decided to play the cartoon megalomaniac in “Superman,” Mr. Hackman said: “You mean, besides the $2 million?” (He had, by that point, blown a fortune on homes, private planes and bad investments.)
His dust-ups with directors are as legendary as his performances. “French Connection” co-star Roy Scheider remembered frequent run-ins between Mr. Hackman and Friedkin over the character. “Friedkin was convinced that Popeye was a madman — nasty, mean, vicious, psychologically deranged,” Scheider told TV Guide in 2003. “Gene wanted to find the human side. Friedkin kept saying there isn’t any.”
Offscreen, Mr. Hackman was known for his trenchant wit. In the early 1960s, he learned to play comedy as a member of a Greenwich Village improvisational troupe called the Premise. Critics later applauded his portrayal of a hapless and desperately lonely blind man — a cameo role — in Mel Brooks’s horror-film spoof “Young Frankenstein” (1974).
It was an unusually small role for an actor of Mr. Hackman’s stature, but he yearned to play a lighter part. He told his friend and tennis partner Gene Wilder, the star of “Young Frankenstein,” that he would take any role for union-scale wages.
“He was very eloquent, very soulful,” Brooks later told Yahoo. “He came up with that line: ‘Where are you going? I was going to make espresso!’ He said, ‘Let me try a few things.’ … I said, ‘Oh, that’s a keeper.’”
In 1986, after years of estrangement, Mr. Hackman divorced Maltese, with whom he had three children. In 1991, he married Arakawa, a classical pianist more than 30 years his junior. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Hackman’s final film, the political satire “Welcome to Mooseport,” opened and quickly closed in 2004. He was still in demand by Hollywood when he retired. “I was getting great offers, but the roles were mostly doddering great-grandfathers,” he said. In addition, he had health setbacks, including angioplasty in 1990 for congestive heart failure.
For the past few decades, Mr. Hackman lived in a series of houses he and Arakawa built for themselves in artist-friendly Santa Fe, where he painted and wrote historical fiction.
Mr. Hackman, whose grandfather and uncle were reporters, said he had always harbored a secret desire to write, and he came to enjoy the solitude and creative control. At one point, he struggled to fashion a screenplay out of a Thomas Harris novel he had optioned. The book was the thriller “Silence of the Lambs,” with script by Harris and Ted Tally, which swept the 1992 Oscars. “I got busy with another film and gave the rights back,” he told the Daily Beast. “Kind of a dumb move as it turned out.”
He claimed not to know the whereabouts of his Oscar statuettes. “We don’t keep them out,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s not that I’m not proud of them. We don’t have anything in the house about show business — except I do have a poster of Errol Flynn.”
Adam Bernstein contributed to this report.
