In 1956, an aspiring young actor named Gene Hackman joined the Pasadena Playhouse in California, struggling to find a way into a field he’d been fascinated with since childhood. Hackman, who was born in 1930, had already served five years in the Marine Corps, then bounced around New York, Florida, Illinois, and other places without much luck. His good friend at Pasadena was another ambitious performer, Dustin Hoffman; together, they were voted “least likely to succeed” by their peers before washing out and moving back to New York to try scratching out a living. Even at the age of 26, Hackman’s hardscrabble features meant he looked like the furthest thing from a marquee idol—he seemed destined to be a bit player at best.
But over the next 50-odd years, Hackman would become the greatest, coolest, earthiest star of what’s now known as New Hollywood: an everyman who defined a generation of moviemaking better than anyone else.
Authorities in Santa Fe, New Mexico, announced this morning that Hackman had died at the age of 95. (His body was found along with that of his wife and one of their dogs; further details are pending, although the cause is not suspected to be foul play.) He retired from acting more than 20 years ago, after a career that won him two Oscars and propelled his rise to genuine if unconventional stardom. Over the course of the 1960s, Hackman had graduated from small parts and theater roles to attention-grabbing supporting work in Bonnie and Clyde, earning his first Oscar nomination in 1968. Four years later, the Academy would name him Best Actor for The French Connection, in which his work as the New York cop Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle characterized the real-world grit he brought to the silver screen.
“Doyle is bad news—but a good cop,” The French Connection’s poster roared. The slogan put the audience in the shoes of a casually bigoted, insubordinate alcoholic who bends the NYPD’s rules in pursuit of drug runners. The director William Friedkin’s film—which also won Best Picture—was part of a tidal wave of challenging, morally complex storytelling that washed ashore starting in the late ’60s. Bonnie and Clyde served as one of the movement’s first examples; its graphically violent antiheroism shocked and thrilled a new generation of moviegoers. The then–relatively unknown Hackman played Buck Barrow, the easygoing older brother to Warren Beatty’s bank robber Clyde. At that point, Hackman was most notable as a stage actor, but he stole every scene he was in alongside the better-established movie stars, grounding the brutality with his textured, endearing work.
Bonnie and Clyde received a slew of Academy Award nominations, including a Supporting Actor nod for Hackman, and lost most of them. Yet Hackman continued to scoop up meaty supporting parts, securing another Oscar nomination for 1970’s I Never Sang for My Father. With The French Connection in 1971, he vaulted to coveted leading-man status. The Academy’s tastes had caught up to the expanding influence of New Hollywood by then, a shift that the film’s five Oscar wins seemed to affirm. Hackman was now an A-lister at the age of 41, though the kind who would happily play a villain or make a cameo as well as fill severe lead roles. He was an actor with very little on-screen ego, even if he did develop a reputation for being somewhat ornery on set.
In the ’70s, he had several memorable leading turns: in the disaster flick The Poseidon Adventure, the shaggy road comedy Scarecrow (alongside his similarly regarded contemporary Al Pacino), and the wonderful neo-noir Night Moves, which reunited him with the Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn. He was also the Man of Steel’s preening arch-enemy, Lex Luthor, in Christopher Reeves’s Superman franchise—a role he then returned to in two sequels, underlining that Hollywood saw him as a go-to tough guy. Maybe his best-ever screen performance came in 1974 with The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola’s masterful exploration of paranoia. Hackman tamped down all of his gritty charm to embody a squirrely surveillance expert, again showcasing a skillful adaptability early in his career.
But the actor did receive another chance to remind Hollywood—and the Academy—just how electrifying his screen persona could be. His turn in 1992’s Unforgiven as “Little Bill” Daggett, a dictatorial sheriff butting heads with Clint Eastwood’s aged outlaw in the Wild West’s dying days, won Hackman a second Oscar; in the ensuing Western revival that followed, he booked roles in films like Geronimo, Wyatt Earp, and The Quick and the Dead. He swung against type in the years that followed, however: In Get Shorty, he abandoned all his masculine swagger to portray a ditzy, failed B-movie director; and he was terrific as the baffled straight man of Mike Nichols’s anarchic comedy The Birdcage.
Hackman’s three best performances in the denouement of his career exemplified the height of this versatility, even as he was winding down. In Crimson Tide, the director Tony Scott’s take on a Cold War thriller, the actor matched wits with Denzel Washington on a submarine, chewing scenery and smoking cigars with dazzling aplomb. He was outstanding in the writer-director David Mamet’s Heist as a hard-case, no-nonsense thief who, according to Mamet’s dialogue, was “so cool, when he goes to sleep, sheep count him.” And in some of his greatest on-screen work ever, Hackman depicted the resentful, acidic patriarch in the Wes Anderson dramedy The Royal Tenenbaums. The role captured all of his ironic charm and misanthropic appeal within the kind of debonair character that the perennial everyman had never quite shown us before. (He earned one last Best Actor trophy for his effort, at the Golden Globes.) After nearly five decades, the actor was still capable of surprises.
Hackman retired from acting shortly after Tenenbaums; his ultimate credits are the little-regarded legal thriller Runaway Jury (2003) and the poorly reviewed comedy Welcome to Mooseport (2004). Even his retirement seemed to reflect his celebrity-shunning, workmanlike approach to acting: He ensconced himself in Santa Fe, where he would be seen around town pumping gas or grabbing food occasionally. He spent his dotage writing historical novels and otherwise avoiding the limelight. The strange particulars of his passing remain a mystery thus far, but Hackman’s life was lived in quiet defiance of Hollywood fame and the strictures of celebrity. It stands to reason that his final years would be no different.
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