Los Angeles, Feb 27: Gene Hackman, the prolific Oscar-winning actor whose studied portraits ranged from reluctant heroes to conniving villains and made him one of the industry’s most respected and honoured performers, has been found dead along with his wife at their home. He was 95.
Hackman was a frequent and versatile presence on screen from the 1960s until his retirement. His dozens of films included the Academy Award favourites “The French Connection” and “Unforgiven”, a breakout performance in “Bonnie and Clyde”, a classic bit of farce in “Young Frankenstein”, a turn as the comic book villain Lex Luthor in “Superman” and the title character in Wes Anderson’s 2001 “The Royal Tenenbaums”.
He seemed capable of any kind of role — whether an uptight buffoon in “Birdcage”, a college coach finding redemption in the sentimental favourite “Hoosiers” or a secretive surveillance expert in Francis Ford Coppola’s Watergate-era release “The Conversation”.
“Gene Hackman a great actor, inspiring and magnificent in his work and complexity,” Coppola said on Instagram. “I mourn his loss, and celebrate his existence and contribution.”
Although self-effacing and unfashionable, Hackman held special status within Hollywood — heir to Spencer Tracy as an everyman, actor’s actor, curmudgeon and reluctant celebrity.
He embodied the ethos of doing his job, doing it very well, and letting others worry about his image. Beyond the obligatory appearances at awards ceremonies, he was rarely seen on the social circuit and made no secret of his disdain for the business side of show business.
“Actors tend to be shy people,” he told Film Comment in 1988. “There is perhaps a component of hostility in that shyness, and to reach a point where you don’t deal with others in a hostile or angry way, you choose this medium for yourself … Then you can express yourself and get this wonderful feedback.”
He was an early retiree — essentially done, by choice, with movies by his mid-70s — and a late bloomer. Hackman was 35 when cast for “Bonnie and Clyde” and past 40 when he won his first Oscar, as the rules-bending New York City detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in the 1971 thriller about tracking down Manhattan drug smugglers, “The French Connection”.
Jackie Gleason, Steve McQueen and Peter Boyle were among the actors considered for Doyle. Hackman was a minor star at the time, seemingly without the flamboyant personality that the role demanded. The actor himself feared that he was miscast. A couple of weeks of nighttime patrols of Harlem in police cars helped reassure him.
One of the first scenes of “The French Connection” required Hackman to slap around a suspect. The actor realised he had failed to achieve the intensity that the scene required, and asked director William Friedkin for another chance.
The scene was filmed at the end of the shooting, by which time Hackman had immersed himself in the loose-cannon character of Popeye Doyle. Friedkin would recall needing 37 takes to get the scene right.
“I had to arouse an anger in Gene that was lying dormant, I felt, within him — that he was sort of ashamed of and didn’t really want to revisit,” Friedkin told the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2012.
The most famous sequence was dangerously realistic: A car chase in which Det. Doyle speeds under elevated subway tracks, his brown Pontiac (driven by a stuntman) screeching into areas that the filmmakers had not received permits for. When Doyle crashes into a white Ford, it wasn’t a stuntman driving the other car, but a New York City resident who didn’t know a movie was being made.
Hackman also resisted the role which brought him his second Oscar. When Clint Eastwood first offered him Little Bill Daggett, the corrupt town boss in “Unforgiven”, Hackman turned it down. But he realised that Eastwood was planning to make a different kind of Western, a critique, not a celebration of violence. The film won him the Academy Award as best supporting actor of 1992.
“To his credit, and my joy, he talked me into it,” Hackman said of Eastwood during an interview with the American Film Institute.
Hackman played super-villain Lex Luthor opposite Christopher Reeve in director Richard Donner’s 1978 “Superman”, a film that established the prototype for the modern superhero movie. He also starred in two sequels.
Eugene Allen Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California, and grew up in Danville, Illinois, where his father worked as a pressman for the Commercial-News. His parents fought repeatedly, and his father often used his fists on Gene to take out his rage. The boy found refuge in movie houses, identifying with such screen rebels as Errol Flynn and James Cagney as his role models.
When Gene was 13, his father waved goodbye and drove off, never to return. The abandonment was a lasting injury to Gene. His mother had become an alcoholic and was constantly at odds with her mother, with whom the shattered family lived (Gene had a younger brother, actor Richard Hackman).
At 16, he “suddenly got the itch to get out.” Lying about his age, he enlisted in the US Marines. In his early 30s, before his film career took off, his mother died in a fire started by her own cigarette.
“Dysfunctional families have sired a lot of pretty good actors,” he observed ironically during a 2001 interview with The New York Times.
His brawling and resistance to authority led to his being demoted from corporal three times. His taste of show business came when he conquered his mic fright and became disc jockey and news announcer on his unit’s radio station.
With a high school degree he earned during his time as a Marine, Hackman enrolled in journalism at the University of Illinois. He dropped out after six months to study radio announcing in New York.
After working at stations in Florida and his hometown of Danville, he returned to New York to study painting at the Art Students League. Hackman switched again to enter an acting course at the Pasadena Playhouse.
