Gene Hackman, the Oscar-winning actor who brought a flinty menace to films such as “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The French Connection” and “Unforgiven” was found dead Wednesday along with his wife in New Mexico, authorities said. He was 95.
The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department said Hackman, his wife Betsy Arakawa and their dog were found in their home and that no foul play was suspected.
Over his long career, Hackman won Academy Awards for portrayals of an obsessed undercover narcotics cop in “The French Connection” and a sadistic Western sheriff in “Unforgiven.” He came to fame on the big screen in “Bonnie and Clyde,” the landmark 1967 movie starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the notorious Depression-era bank robbers. His supporting role as Buck Barrow, Clyde’s good-old-boy brother, earned Hackman his first Oscar nomination.
“Because of ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’” Hackman told The Times in 1968, “quite a few people come up to me, and I’m not the kind of person you come up to — I look so common.”
A 6-foot-2 ex-Marine and barroom brawler with a face he once described as “your everyday mineworker,” Hackman went on to become one of Hollywood’s most prolific stars and continued to appear in films long after turning into what he called an “old man with baggy chins, tired eyes and a receding hairline.”
His film career spanned more than 40 years and nearly 80 films, including “The Conversation,” “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Superman,” “Hoosiers,” “Twice in a Lifetime,” “No Way Out,” “Mississippi Burning,” “The Firm,” “Crimson Tide,” “Get Shorty,” “The Birdcage” and “Absolute Power.”
The stage-trained Broadway alumnus received his second supporting actor Oscar nomination for “I Never Sang for My Father,” a 1970 drama in which he portrayed a middle-aged professor trying to start a new life while dealing with his demanding elderly father, played by Melvyn Douglas.
But it was his 1971 role as New York City cop Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in “The French Connection” that turned the 41-year-old Hackman into a major star and earned him an Oscar for best actor. The film also was named best picture.
The tough-guy role, for which he donned a porkpie hat, was modeled after New York Police Det. Eddie Egan, whom Hackman and costar Roy Scheider, in preparing for the film, accompanied on his rounds of heroin “shooting galleries” with his detective partner, Sonny Grosso.
Depicting his character’s tendency for violence early in the gritty film’s production was not easy for Hackman.
“I had to slap this guy around in a squad car, and it was tough for me to really hit him,” he told the Boston Globe in 1995. “I said to Billy Friedkin, the director, ‘I don’t think I can do this.’ And he said, ‘Well, we’ll talk about it.’ And of course we never talked about it. We just went on. For whatever reason, I got more comfortable with the film. Then, after three months, we went back and reshot that scene.
“Of course, after working three months on the streets of New York, I was perfectly able to pop the guy just as hard as they wanted me to. That was a turning point for me.”
The movie became famous for having one of the most spectacular car chases ever filmed: Hackman’s Doyle in a hair-raising pursuit of an elevated train that had been hijacked by a hit man.
Hackman later said he did “only 60%” of the driving for the sequence; the main chase shots were filmed in one take with stunt driver Bill Hickman at the wheel of a Pontiac LeMans that went 90 mph for 26 blocks without stopping.
Hackman began racing sports cars in the mid-’70s. But, he told The Times in 1988, “the driving in ‘The French Connection’ was much more frightening than anything I ever did on a track.”
In 1989, Hackman earned another best actor Oscar nomination, for his role in “Mississippi Burning” as a 1960s Southern FBI agent investigating the disappearance of three civil rights workers who had been murdered.
He won his second Oscar — for best supporting actor — for his performance as Little Bill Daggett, the brutal sheriff in the 1992 western “Unforgiven,” a best picture Oscar winner directed by and starring Clint Eastwood.
He needed Hackman for the role, Eastwood told the The Times in 1994, “because he can make an unsympathetic character sympathetic.”
Hackman was “playing a guy who turns out to be a villain, yet he still had a comedic twist to it. He’s a three-dimensional villain. You believed he had a point of view and wasn’t just a guy sneering,” Eastwood said.
Eastwood, who also directed Hackman as a philandering U.S. president in the 1997 thriller “Absolute Power,” was a longtime fan.
“He was consistently good even if the picture he was in wasn’t,” Eastwood said in the 2001 interview. “He brought more to it than probably was there in the first place. When you work with him, you appreciate him even more.”
Tony Scott, who directed Hackman in “Enemy of the State” and “Crimson Tide,” told The Times in 2001 that there were “a myriad of colors behind Gene’s eyes and behind his face” that come across on screen. “You feel what is going on inside his head and behind his eyes.”
Sydney Pollack, who directed Hackman as a corrupt lawyer in “The Firm,” told The Times in 1994 that Hackman “always had an element of danger about him. You’re never completely sure of what he’s going to do.”
Hackman said that he didn’t care if a character was “sympathetic or not; that’s not important to me. I want to make you believe this could be a human being.”
As an actor, Hackman was known to keep his distance from other cast members. “It’s better to stay alone or at arm’s length,” he told The Times in 1994. “You’re more apt to be easy with someone if they’re a friend.”
He also avoided giving interviews.
“Well, only because I don’t like talking about myself,” he said. “I guess I’m a private person. For me, acting is a kind of private thing, and I just don’t like sharing it.”
Hackman also was known for having run-ins with directors, including Friedkin.
“We had a challenging relationship, and I would say a difficult one, on ‘The French Connection,’” Friedkin told The Times in 2001. “But it was always toward the same result — always toward trying to get the best we could.”
The actor acknowledged that he never had a completely comfortable relationship with directors.
“I’m a funny guy,” he said with his signature chuckle in the 1994 Times interview. “I didn’t have much of a dad, so directors are always authority figures to me.”
Hackman was born in San Bernardino on Jan. 30, 1930, and his family ultimately settled in Danville, Ill. His father, a newspaper pressman, never made enough money to buy a house, so they lived with Hackman’s maternal grandmother.
His relationship with his father was rocky.
“My dad was not a strong guy,” Hackman told The Times in 1988. “He was weak and he would overcome that by being too strong physically, by beating me. I resented it because the punishment didn’t fit the crime.”
His parents’ marriage abruptly ended when Hackman was 13: He was playing in a friend’s yard when his father drove by and gave him a wave that left no doubt in Hackman’s mind that he wasn’t coming back.
“That was kind of tough,” Hackman said. “Thirteen is certainly a very impressionable age, and the way my dad left was not a good idea, just to wave goodbye and not stop, not to say anything.… My brother [Richard] was just 6 weeks old at the time, and suddenly my dad put me in the position of having to be the man of the house. I had a lot of resentment.”
At 16, Hackman joined the Marines. “I didn’t want to be around that house and have that kind of responsibility,” he said. “I suppose I should’ve stayed and done the right thing, but I just had to get out.”
While in the Marines, he had a tour in Asia and was often reprimanded for insubordination. Hackman also volunteered to be a disc jockey and read the news on the military radio station.
After his discharge in 1952, he studied journalism for six months at the University of Illinois, then moved to New York and went into television production. He later worked at stations in Florida and Danville.
But then he moved to California to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse, and met a younger actor who became a lifelong friend, Dustin Hoffman.
“I always had it in my head that I wanted to be an actor, but when I was in high school, I was too shy to do anything about it,” Hackman told the Los Angeles Daily News in 2001. “Pasadena was the first time I had the courage to actually get up there on stage and see if I liked it or if it was just some dumb idea.”
In 1988, Hackman told The Times: “If you have some kind of disturbed childhood, you go into acting to exorcise that, to point out who you are.… When I’m given a role that has a lot of darkness in it, it appeals to me.”
After he and Hoffman reportedly were voted “least likely to succeed” at the Pasadena Playhouse, Hackman returned to New York in the late 1950s and began studying Method acting with George Morrison, an alumnus of Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio.
During his years as an actor in New York, Hackman palled around with Hoffman and another struggling actor, Robert Duvall, and worked a variety of jobs that included doorman and cab driver.
In 1961, Hackman joined an improvisational troupe directed by Morrison called the Premise; the same year, he made his first appearance in film as a cop in the Depression-era gangster film “Mad Dog Coll.”
His first big break came in 1964 when he appeared on Broadway with Sandy Dennis in the comedy hit “Any Wednesday.”
That year, he also had a small but memorable role in “Lilith,” a film drama starring Beatty, who later said “the best thing about ‘Lilith’ was Gene Hackman.” Beatty remembered him during the casting of “Bonnie and Clyde,” which Beatty produced.
In later years, Hackman was the voice-over announcer in TV and radio commercials for Lowe’s. His final movie credit as an actor was the 2004 comedy “Welcome to Mooseport.” He announced his retirement for Larry King shortly after the film’s release.
Off-screen, his activities included flying airplanes and painting using an approach he described as Manet-style Impressionism. In 1999, he added novelist to his resume.
He wrote three historical novels with Daniel Lenihan, “Wake of the Perdido Star,” “Justice for None” and “Escape From Andersonville.”
With his first wife, Faye, whom he married in 1956, he had three children — Christopher, Elizabeth and Leslie — before divorcing in the 1980s.
A longtime resident of Santa Fe, N.M., where he he became an avid cyclist at the age of 88, Hackman married his second wife, classical pianist Betsy Arakawa, in 1991. He is survived by his wife and three children, Christopher, Elizabeth and Leslie.
McLellan is a former Times staff writer
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