Never the Same Man, but Always Gene Hackman

Last Wednesday, the bodies of Gene Hackman and his wife, classical pianist Betsy Arakawa, were discovered in their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Both Hackman, who was ninety-five, and Arakawa, who was sixty-five, are believed to have died on February 17, and the mystery surrounding the circumstances of their deaths has baffled their families and friends as well as local authorities.

Hackman became an in-demand, A-list, above-the-title movie star in perhaps the only era in American cinema that would have allowed it, the late 1960s and early ’70s. It was the dawn of the New Hollywood, “that roughly decadelong, feverish period of artistic ferment that began with films like Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn’s 1967 gangster drama,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

Dargis points out that this era was “famously defined by directors who helped rejuvenate the industry but was also known for male stars who didn’t conform to old studio ideals. With their unfixed noses and rough edges, these were men who once would have been largely confined to character roles. The glamorous-looking Warren Beatty played the male lead in Bonnie and Clyde, but it was Hackman’s striking supporting turn as Clyde’s brother, Buck, that heralded something new.”

Bonnie and Clyde is one of the films Mark Harris tells the stories behind in Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, and Harris has written the essay that accompanies our forthcoming release of the second film Hackman and Penn made together, Night Moves (1975). “Hackman's signature was a kind of immersion in his roles that was so free of artifice or visible contrivance,” writes Harris on Bluesky, “that when you watched his performances, it was easy to think his greatness was just a matter of perfect casting. It never was. He was just that good.”

Born in San Bernardino, California, Hackman was thirteen when his father abandoned the family and sixteen when he lied about his age to join the Marines. He served as a field-radio operator in China, Hawaii, and Japan, and when he returned, he knocked around the country in various jobs before deciding to take up acting. At the Pasadena Playhouse, he found a lifelong friend in Dustin Hoffman, and the two of them were famously voted “least likely to succeed.”

Determined to prove their fellow players wrong, the pair headed to New York, where they shared a series of hardscrabble apartments with Robert Duvall. Hackman took bit roles in television series, performed in a string of off-Broadway plays, and eventually landed a role in a Broadway hit, Any Wednesday, which opened in 1964 and ran for two years. Robert Rossen cast Hackman in his first credited film role in Lilith (1964), costarring Jean Seberg, Peter Fonda, Kim Hunter, and crucially, Warren Beatty, who went on to produce Bonnie and Clyde.

Hackman’s performance as Buck scored him his first Oscar nomination, and the second followed soon after for his turn as a professor in Gilbert Cates’s I Never Sang for My Father (1970). The breakthrough came the following year with The French Connection (1971). William Friedkin was reluctant to cast Hackman as Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, the gruff and bigoted New York detective determined to crack a heroin ring. He wanted—but could not afford—Paul Newman, and Steve McQueen, Lee Marvin, James Caan, and Robert Mitchum all turned him down.

Friedkin settled for Hackman, whose Popeye, as Roger Ebert wrote, “generated an almost frightening single-mindedness, a cold determination to win at all costs, which elevated the stakes in the story from a simple police cat-and-mouse chase into the acting-out of Popeye’s pathology.” The movie was a runaway hit, and Hackman won his first Oscar, becoming one of Hollywood’s unlikeliest leading men.

Hackman “once joked that he looked like ‘your everyday mine worker,’” notes Robert Berkvist in the NYT. “And he did seem to have been born middle-aged: slightly balding, with strong but unremarkable features neither plain nor handsome, a tall man (six-foot-two) more likely to melt into a crowd than stand out in one.” Esther Zuckerman adds in the NYT that Hackman “had a pugnacious ability to almost goad you into liking guys who would otherwise be despicable, be they criminals, cops, or just absentee fathers.”

He “could be wry and charming,” writes Adam Nayman for the BFI, “but he was also good at anxiety and existential befuddlement; he had a knack for playing characters without reason to believe they might be the heroes of their own stories. Where other performers pushed themselves to physical and behavioral extremes, chasing after transformation or transcendence, Hackman stood his ground. His range was remarkable and deceptive: whether playing melancholy ciphers, sociopathic killers, or existentially addled Everymen, he stayed resolutely within himself.”

“Hackman’s career makes a case against the received wisdom that physically transformative ‘chameleonic’ acting should be considered the pinnacle of the trade,” writes Matt Zoller Seitz for Vulture. “Hackman rarely changed his appearance beyond adding or subtracting glasses or facial hair. But he was never the same guy twice . . . The best special makeup is talent.”

“One of my favorite Hackman villains is the conniving country-boy crime boss Mary Ann in Michael Ritchie’s sublimely caustic satire Prime Cut (1972),” writes Time’s Stephanie Zacharek. “Mary Ann runs a heartland meat-packing plant as a coverup for his deeply unsavory human-trafficking business; he has no qualms about chopping up his enemies and stuffing their pulverized remains into sausage casing . . . Hackman revels in it all: he loved going deep inside his characters, even the seemingly not-very-deep ones, and shaking them down for their secrets, which he’d then spread before us like a wealth of pennies.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney flags a few more dark roles, including “the FBI agent going after murderous Klansmen in Mississippi Burning; the political journalist in Roger Spottiswoode’s crackling thriller Under Fire; the crooked Old West mayor in Sam Raimi’s irresistibly bonkers The Quick and the Dead; or the U.S. Navy submarine commander in Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide.”

While Hackman was “no doubt deadly serious about his craft,” adds Rooney, he also “refused to take himself too seriously. Witness his shady B-movie director with a gambling habit, Harry Zimm, in Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty; his gleefully sinister (and unsurpassed) take on arch-villain Lex Luthor in the Christopher Reeve Superman movies; or his self-righteous family values-championing politician, Senator Keeley, in The Birdcage.”

“How do you play an invisible man, a human smudge?” asks Ty Burr in the Washington Post. In Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), Hackman’s Harry Caul is a surveillance expert who believes a couple he has recorded may be in danger. “Harry’s officious little mustache, his glasses and his headphones serve as walls to keep others at bay,” writes Burr, “but the actor does something more—he illustrates the impossibility of hiding from oneself in the glimmers of personality that this walking ghost can’t help but leak and in the conscience he pretends not to have.”

In Night Moves, Hackman plays another Harry, a private investigator working a missing-persons case. Picking out thirteen memorable performances for the NYT, Alex Marshall and Noel Murray note that Night Moves is “a movie about people going nowhere, slowly; and Hackman delivers a memorably lived-in performance as a detective mainly searching for his own elusive dignity.”

Hackman didn’t see one of his biggest hits in the 1980s coming. In 2011, he told Michael Hainey in GQ that he took the role of Norman Dale—a high school civics and history teacher hired to coach the basketball team in a rural Indiana town—in David Anspaugh’s Hoosiers (1986) because “I was desperate for money. I took it for all the wrong reasons, and it turned out to be one of those films that stick around.”

Clint Eastwood persuaded Hackman to embody one of his most despicable characters, the sadistic Sheriff “Little” Bill Daggett, in Unforgiven (1992). At RogerEbert.com, Scout Tafoya describes Daggett as “a man who wields peace like the butt of a gun, beating the hell out of people while crowds gather to see him dole out frontier justice. When [Hackman] won his Oscar, he just laughed, in the most winning fashion imaginable.”

Hackman officially announced his retirement after the release of Donald Petrie’s Welcome to Mooseport (2004), a comedy that didn’t fly. Most of us prefer to think of his turn as the patriarch of a brilliant but unhappy family in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) as the ideal career-capper.

“A disbarred lawyer,” wrote the NYT’s A. O. Scott, Royal “comes on like a con man whose biggest con is admitting that he is one. Mr. Hackman has the amazing ability to register belligerence, tenderness, confusion, and guile within the space of a few lines of dialogue. You never know where he’s going, but it always turns out to be exactly the right place.”

On Sunday night, Morgan Freeman, who costarred with Hackman in Unforgiven and Stephen Hopkins’s Under Suspicion (2000), noted that “Gene always said, ‘I don’t think about legacy. I just hope people remember me as someone who tried to do good work.’ So, I think I speak for us all when I say: Gene, you’ll be remembered for that and so much more. Rest in peace, my friend.”