Hard boiled and no sufferer of fools was a near constant of many of his roles and in real life Gene Hackman was rumoured to be the same.
Born on 30th January 1930 in San Bernardino, California to a a waitress mother and journalist father the family led an itinerant lifestyle moving from town to town before his father left the family for good when Gene Hackman was only 13 years old. Never really feeling he had roots he lied about his age and at 16 years of age he joined the marines serving in the Far East before he was medically discharged after a motor bike accident.
Hackman now needed work trying out several jobs and in 1956 he married Faye Maltese who encouraged him to try acting moving to the West coast and joining a drama college where he and Dustin Hoffman enrolled. Having graduated he and Faye moved back to New York doing odd jobs in between the infrequent TV work in the early 1960’s and he now had a son and daughter to support. He appeared in a couple of films including one with Warren Beatty who , having turned producer on Bonnie and Clyde, cast him in a role that saw him earn his first Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor. After this he started accepting every offer given to him in a number of forgotten though occasionally decent films in the late 1960’s when he had a third child in a marriage that was now struggling.
1970 saw him gain a second Oscar nomination for ‘I Never Sang For My Fathe’r a film that did little box office business. But it was his next film that would change it all for him. Rejected by a load of actors including Steve McQueen, ‘The French Connection’ saw him as a hard nosed cop prepared to bend the rules in relentless pursuit of drug dealers. This time it was role that would win him an Oscar in what would be a film as memorable for its ground breaking car chase as it was for his performance and he returned to the role for a darker sequel. He cemented his star status between the films with a big budget disaster movie, ‘The Poseidon Adventure’ that earned him a Best Actor BAFTA which he had also won for the first French Connection film. Those first few years of the 1970’s also saw him in Francis Ford Coppola’s excellent ‘The Conversation’ and all these often brutal and downbeat roles were in direct contrast to a rare foray into comedy in Mel Brooks’ ‘Young Frankenstein’ as a blind hermit.
But the latter half of the seventies were not so kind to him, appearing in long forgotten films bar one, Superman, appearing in it as Lex Luthor and shot back to back with the sequel that would appear in 1980. But between those films he stepped away from the industry altogether increasingly irked by the slowness of shooting movies. Instead he took the opportunity to indulge his flair for painting. But the 1980’s saw him back in demand with acclaimed films that include Reds, Under Fire, Eureka , No Way Out and let down only by the woeful Superman IV in 1987. 1988 saw him in Alan Parker’s controversial, ‘Mississippi Burning’ that saw Hackman earn another Oscar nomination. The downside of that decade would be the divorce from his first wife in 1986.
The 1990’ saw Gene Hackman get really busy after appearing in 25 films in just 10 years including Unforgiven that Clint Eastwood had nagged him to do and it won Hackman his second Oscar, a BAFTA and a Golden Globe. By now he had his own production company and it was under that banner that he optioned The Silence of the Lambs to play Hannibal Lector dropping out at the insistence of his daughter who felt the material was a step too far. In the year that the film came out he married again for a second and final time, this time to pianist Betsy Arakawa.
He rarely gave interviews but he did for a novel ‘Wake of the Perdido Star’ in 2000 that he co-wrote with Dan Lenihan despite a busy schedule. But it was not long before he returned to big budget films but it was the smaller art house film ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ (2002) from director Wes Anderson that drew further acclaim despite rumoured clashes with the director. By now he was tiring of the industry and after the forgettable comedy, ‘Welcome to Mooseport’ (2004) he announced on a TV interview that he was retiring or least making plans to not act again. Instead he returned to writing – co-writing three novels with Dan Lenihan again followed by two further novels he wrote alone.
On 26th February 2025 Gene Hackman along with his wife and their family dog were all found dead at their home in Santa Fe , New Mexico. He was 95 years old.
related feature : Jon Ronson talks about his life, career highs & lows plus his favourite films
related feature : William Friedkin – obituary of The French Connection director
