Gene Hackman, who has died in New Mexico at the age of 95, was the model of the character actor who got to be leading man. Never exactly dashing. Not likely to be confused with a romantic hero. Yet, from the early 1970s, he formed the hard, authentic centre of the best in American cinema: a disreputable hero in The French Connection; haunted by an obsession with the sounds between the sounds in The Conversation; wearing the nation’s post-Watergate angst in Night Moves. From the moment Hackman properly arrived, it was clear he was to remain a vital component in the Hollywood machine. Indeed, it seemed hard to believe he had not always been there. The world immediately recognised the existence of a “Hackman type” – stoic, unshowy – while accepting that only one actor would ever be in that category.
The shocking, puzzling news that he has been found dead at home with his wife and dog brings about the end of an aeon. He had been in retirement for 20 years, but remained an inspiration for actors impressed by unfussy integrity, by the ability to dominate from a quiet corner of the room.
He was born in San Bernardino, but, like so many American families, moved about a bit before settling in Danville, Illinois (the blue-collar midwest suits the Hackman myth better than Southern California). He had ambitions to be an actor from an early age, but a great deal of life intervened before he found fame. He signed up with United States Marine Corps and served more than four years as a radio operator.
Following discharge and a spell in college, he made his way back to California and joined the Pasadena Playhouse. He later moved to New York and, in a mythical period, bummed about the city’s low-rent apartments with the likes of Robert Duvall and Pasadena colleague Dustin Hoffman. None of that trio looked, even in the post-method era, how a movie star was supposed to look. By the middle of the 1970s, they were the defining screen actors of their generation.
Bit roles came on TV and film. He had a hit on stage opposite Sandy Dennis in Ash Wednesday. He was already an idol for certain actors “in the know” when, in 1967, Warren Beatty cast him as Clyde Barrow’s brother in Bonnie and Clyde. If you wish to remain ageless in cinema it is a good idea – as Duvall would also attest – to lose a bit of hair before your time. Hackman was 37, oldish for a breakthrough, when Bonnie and Clyde came out, and remained middle-aged from then until his last big-screen outing in Donald Petrie’s fitful Welcome to Mooseport from 2004.
Hackman was among the actors most responsible for changing Hollywood in its post-classical 1970s, but, unlike Robert De Niro or Al Pacino, he didn’t exactly seem of the age. That solid face could have occupied space in the background of a John Ford picture. But he was not entirely comfortable with being identified as the ideal “everyman”.
“I suppose it has something to do with the number of roles that I’ve played that are common guys, and that maybe I’ve done them in an okay manner,” he said in 1992. “So, people then think that I am synonymous with that kind of common guy ... It’s a little demeaning sounding, but I know that people mean well by it. So, I don’t care really.” The interviewer reported he laughed after saying that.
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His first Oscar came as Popeye Doyle, the “unconventional” cop in William Friedkin’s The French Connection from 1971. The whole film is a highlight, but, over the next few days, video obituaries will make much of the brilliantly peculiar scene in which he intimidates a suspect by firing non-sequiturs at him. “Do You Pick Your Feet In Poughkeepsie? Huh, huh?” Friedkin later guiltily admitted the two men had their squabbles. “His outbursts [on-screen] were aimed directly at me ... more than the drug smugglers,” the volatile director said.
He was better still (or as good, anyway) as the disintegrating Harry Caul in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation from 1974. Like Night Moves from a year later, the film was drenched in the paranoia that characterised the United States from the JFK assassination to the aftermath of Watergate. In his unflattering Pac-a-mac, Caul, a surveillance expert, stood in for all the millions of ordinary Joes who felt the nation was being surreptitiously stolen. There are, perhaps, more Harry Cauls around now than ever.
Fans will correctly argue that he never gave a bad performance. He also did a decent job (not easy in Hollywood during the 1980s and 1990s) of avoiding bad films. A second Oscar came for playing the ruthless lawman in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven from 1992. He was again a figure of malign authority in Tony Scott’s fine Crimson Tide from 1995. In 2001, closer to retirement than many would have preferred, he delivered a great, sad comic performance as the paterfamilias in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. He was, by then, a legend, but not any sort of relic. When you never seemed young on screen you never seem old. That turn demonstrated a gift for comedy that had been apparent in his unrecognisable cameo as the ingratiating hermit in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein back in 1974. So obliterating is the humour that it is impossible to watch OP Heggie in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein – the obvious model – without sniggering at Hackman’s parallel delivery as he sets fire to Peter Boyle’s thumb.
Hackman was married to Faye Maltese from 1956 until 1986 and, from 1991 until their death, to classical pianist Betsy Arakawa. They apparently lived an active live on a lofty hill in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Hackman was a fan of car racing and of American football. At time of writing, no cause had been found for the couple’s death.
He will remain an icon of artistic truthfulness. And he will inspire those tempted to slacken from effort. “I think that if you’ve done your best work, then you’re on your way down,” he said. “You always think in terms of that your best work lies ahead of you, that you’re maturing and growing as an actor, and that you still have something to offer. It’s really that simple.”
