Gene Hackman, an 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.
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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 in Hollywood - heir to Spencer Tracy as an everyman, actor's actor, curmudgeon and reluctant celebrity. 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 night-time patrols of Harlem in police cars helped reassure him.
Hackman also resisted the role that 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.
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.
Hackman's father left when he was 13, an abandonment that was a lasting injury. His mother became 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 lied about his age to enlist 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 to study radio announcing in New York. After working at stations in Florida and his home town of Danville, he returned to New York to study painting. Hackman switched again to enter an acting course at the Pasadena Playhouse in California.
Back in New York, he worked as a doorman and truck driver among other jobs while waiting for a break as an actor, sweating it out with such fellow hopefuls as Robert Duvall and Dustin Hoffman. Summer work at a theatre on Long Island led to roles off-Broadway and the attention of Broadway producers.
During a tryout for a play, Hackman was seen by film director Robert Rossen, who hired him for a brief role in Lilith, which starred Warren Beatty and Jean Seberg. He played small roles in other films and leads in television dramas of the early 1960s such as The Defenders and Naked City.
When Beatty began work on Bonnie and Clyde, which he produced and starred in, he remembered Hackman and cast him as bank robber Clyde Barrow's outgoing brother. Pauline Kael in The New Yorker called Hackman's work "a beautifully controlled performance, the best in the film", and he was nominated for an Academy Award as supporting actor.
Hackman's first starring film role came in 1970 with I Never Sang for My Father, as a man struggling to deal with a failed relationship with his dying father, Melvyn Douglas. Because of Hackman's distress over his own father, he resisted connecting to the role.
In his 2001 Times interview, he recalled: "Douglas told me, 'Gene, you'll never get what you want with the way you're acting.' And he didn't mean acting; he meant I was not behaving myself. He taught me not to use my reservations as an excuse for not doing the job." Even though he had the central part, Hackman was Oscar-nominated as supporting actor and Douglas as lead. The following year he won the Oscar as best actor for The French Connection.
Hackman kept working, in pictures good and bad. In 2001 alone, he appeared in The Mexican, Heartbreakers, Heist, The Royal Tenenbaums and Behind Enemy Lines. But by 2004, he was openly talking about retirement.
In 1956, Hackman married Fay Maltese, a bank teller he had met at a YMCA dance in New York. They had a son, Christopher, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Leslie, but divorced in the mid-1980s. In 1991 he married Betsy Arakawa, a classical pianist.
In his latter years, he wrote novels and lived on his ranch in Sante Fe, New Mexico, on a hilltop looking out on the Colorado Rockies, a view he preferred to his films that popped up on television.
"I'll watch maybe five minutes of it," he once told Time magazine, "and I'll get this icky feeling, and I turn the channel."
with AP
Australian Associated Press