Gene Hackman’s most career-making moments as Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in William Friedkin’s gritty 1971 New York neo noir The French Connection illuminated the true nature of one of cinema’s most renowned and respected tough guys. His cat and mouse surveillance of a drug boss on the subway, and his famous pursuit of an elevated train – often cited as one of cinema’s greatest car chases – reflected the dogged determination, duck-and-dive journey and rough-and-tumble attitude of a two-time Oscar winner and star of 85 movies, who was found dead at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico alongside his wife and dog yesterday (February 26), aged 95.
Hackman came to cinema relatively late in his career, making his first credited appearance in 1964’s Lilith (starring Warren Beatty) at the age of 34. His route there had been long and bumpy. Born in San Bernadino, California, in 1930, his family moved frequently during his youth and fractured in 1943. The “hurt and disappointment” of his father leaving the family with a wave from a car would go on to fuel some of his most fraught performances.
A trouble-making teenager with a love of James Cagney movies, at 16 he lied about his age in order to join the Marine Corps and spent four years serving in Japan and Mao’s revolutionary China, where he gained a reputation as a brawler. However, a motorcycle accident left him unfit to join his battalion in the Korean War and in 1951 Hackman was discharged, spending six months studying journalism at the University of Illinois before quitting for New York to pursue the dreams of acting he’d harboured since the age of 10.
They would be a long time reaching fruition though. For much of his early twenties Hackman drifted through odd jobs in New York, working as a truck driver, furniture cleaner, shop assistant and doorman – his old drill sergeant spotting him on the door of a Times Square hotel and declaring him “a sorry son of a bitch” only fired his determination to succeed on the stage. At 26 he moved back to California and enrolled at the Pasadena Playhouse’s acting school, where he was considered old and untalented, but made good friends in fellow oddball (and conga playing partner) Dustin Hoffman. The pair, both voted “Least Likely To Succeed” by their classmates, decamped to NYC after Hackman was thrown out of the school after an inauspicious year and shared an apartment with a young Robert Duvall as they pursued their acting ambitions.
Hackman juggled minor stage and screen roles – often in crime drama TV shows such as Naked City and The Defenders, and plays including Broadway misses (his debut Children From Their Games) and hits (1964’s Any Wednesday and Poor Richard) – with work at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. He saw every rejection as a challenge: “It was more psychological warfare, because I wasn’t going to let those fuckers get me down,” he said in a 2004 interview. “If you’re really interested in acting, there is a part of you that relishes the struggle.”
Small film roles began filtering in and 1967 was a turning point. Having been dropped from the role of Mr Robinson in The Graduate for being too young, he was picked up to play Warren Beatty’s fiery and rebellious older brother Buck Barrow in Bonnie And Clyde, a role which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Though he’d continue making stage and TV appearances in the following years (he even wisely turned down the role of Mike Brady in The Brady Bunch), Hackman was now a big screen star, honing his craft in cult films such as Marooned and sky-diving classic The Gypsy Moths, as well as earning his second Supporting Actor nomination for 1970’s I Never Sang For My Father.
The French Connection won him the Best Actor Oscar and launched him into one of Hollywood’s most prolific 1970s film careers, where his rugged intensity helped him shine as action heroes (in 1972’s ocean liner disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure), haunted investigators (Francis Ford Coppola’s Palme d’Or winner The Conversation, 1974), ex-con hitmen (The Domino Principle, 1977) and wartime generals (1977’s star-smothered A Bridge Too Far).
He also displayed increasing depth and range, capable of encapsulating short-tempered vagabond Max in 1973’s picaresque Scarecrow (alongside Al Pacino), Lex Luthor’s comedic menace in early Superman films and his hard-bitten magazine editor in Warren Beatty’s acclaimed 1981 drama Reds. Over the ‘80s and ‘90s he evolved into roles of mature emotional resonance. “Gene is someone who is a very intuitive and instinctive actor,” said Alan Parker, whose 1988 film Mississippi Burning earned Hackman (playing FBI agent Rupert Anderson) his second Best Actor Oscar nomination, after several years of personal struggle caused by divorce, extravagant spending and the suicide of his friend Norman Garey in 1982. “He can look at a scene and he can cut through to what is necessary, and he does it with extraordinary economy—he’s the quintessential movie actor.”
Hackman’s broad skills saw him celebrated both as sadistic sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Oscar winner Unforgiven and in comedic roles in 1996’s The Birdcage and Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums in 2001. An adaptable late career across drama, thriller, rom-com and animated films (he played the voice of General Mandible in 1998’s Antz) ended with a final role in 2004 comedy Welcome To Mooseport, after which Hackman retired, stressed and frustrated by the movie machine. “The straw that broke the camel’s back was actually a stress test that I took in New York,” he told Empire in 2009. “The doctor advised me that my heart wasn’t in the kind of shape that I should be putting it under any stress.”
Instead, Hackman concentrated on writing historical fiction alongside co-writer Daniel Lenihan and several solo novels. He had been married to his second wife Betsy Arakawa, who died with him, since 1991.