According to authorities, Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman, his wife, and their dog were discovered dead in their New Mexico home on Thursday.
Although foul play was not suspected, authorities stated that an investigation was still underway but did not disclose the circumstances of their deaths.
When deputies arrived at their residence at 1:45 p.m. to check on the welfare of Hackman, 95, Betsy Arakawa, 63, and their dog, they found them all dead. Spokesman Denise Avila of the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office stated on Wednesday.
From the 1960s until his retirement, Hackman appeared on screen often and in a variety of roles. Among his numerous roles were the Academy Award winners The French Connection and Unforgiven, the title character in Wes Anderson’s 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums, a breakthrough performance in Bonnie and Clyde, a classic bit of farce in Young Frankenstein, and a role as the comic book villain Lex Luthor in Superman.
He appeared to be able to play any kind of character, whether it was a snobbish idiot in Birdcage, a college coach seeking atonement in the heartwarming hit Hoosiers, or a covert surveillance specialist in Francis Ford Coppola’s Watergate-era film The Conversation.
Coppola wrote on Instagram that Gene Hackman is a brilliant actor who is inspiring and magnificent in his work and complexity. I honor his life and contributions while grieving his passing.
Even though Hackman was unfashionable and self-effacing, he had a unique place in Hollywood as Spencer Tracy’s heir, acting as an actor’s actor, a reclusive celebrity, and an everyman. He was the epitome of the maxim “do your job, do it well, and let others worry about your image.” He was rarely spotted on the social scene outside of the required appearances at award shows, and he was open about his contempt for the commercial side of entertainment.
In 1988, he told Film Comment that shy people are often actors. Perhaps there is a hostile element to that shyness, and you chose this medium for yourself in order to get to a place where you don’t interact with people in a hostile or irate manner. You can then express yourself and receive this amazing feedback.
Hackman was 35 when he was cast in Bonnie and Clyde, and he was over 40 when he took home his first Oscar, playing the unconventional New York City detective Jimmy Popeye Doyle in the 1971 thriller The French Connection, which followed Manhattan drug runners.
Among the performers who were considered for Doyle were Peter Boyle, Steve McQueen, and Jackie Gleason. At the time, Hackman was a little-known celebrity who didn’t seem to have the bombastic flair that the part required. The actor was afraid of being miscast. He was reassured by a few weeks of police car patrols of Harlem at night.
Hackman had to slap a suspect in one of the opening sequences of The French Connection. After realizing that he had fallen short of the scene’s demands for passion, the actor begged director William Friedkin for another shot. By the time the sequence was shot, Hackman had fully established himself as Popeye Doyle, a loose-cannon persona. Friedkin would remember that it took 37 takes to perfect the sequence.
In 2012, Friedkin told the Los Angeles Review of Books, “I had to awaken an anger in Gene that was dormant, I felt, within him, that he was sort of ashamed of and didn’t really want to revisit.”
A automobile chase in which Det. Doyle drives beneath elevated subway tracks while his brown Pontiac, piloted by a stuntman, screeches into regions for which the producers lacked permissions was the most well-known scene. It was alarmingly realistic. The driver of the second vehicle, a New York City citizen who was unaware that a movie was being produced, was not a stuntman when Doyle collides with a white Ford.
Additionally, Hackman rejected the part that earned him his second Oscar. Hackman declined Clint Eastwood’s initial offer to play the unscrupulous town boss Little Bill Daggett in Unforgiven. However, he understood that Eastwood intended to create a critique rather than a celebration of violence in his Western. He received the 1992 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the movie.
In an interview with the American Film Institute, Hackman praised Eastwood and said, “To his credit, and to my joy, he talked me into it.”
In Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman, which set the standard for the contemporary superhero movie, Hackman portrayed supervillain Lex Luthor alongside Christopher Reeve. He starred in two sequels as well.
Born in San Bernardino, California, Eugene Allen Hackman was raised in Danville, Illinois, where his father was a newspaper pressman. His father frequently beat Gene with his fists to vent his anger during their many arguments. The child sought solace at movie theaters, where he identified with screen rebels like James Cagney and Errol Flynn as role models.
His father said good-bye and drove away when Gene was thirteen, never to be seen again. For Gene, the desertion was a lifelong wound. The broken family lived with his mother, who had turned into an alcoholic and was in frequent conflict with her mother (Gene had a younger brother, actor Richard Hackman). He suddenly felt the need to go when he was sixteen. He joined the U.S. Marines by lying about his age.
In an ironic 2001 interview with The New York Times, he noted that dysfunctional families have produced many talented actors.
During his Marine career, he was demoted three times from corporal due to his fighting and defiance of orders. He had his first taste of show business when he overcame his fear of the microphone to work as a news announcer and disc jockey on the radio station of his unit.
After completing his high school education while serving in the Marines, Hackman enrolled at the University of Illinois to study journalism. After half a year, he left to study radio announcing in New York. He worked at stations in Danville, his hometown, and Florida before coming back to New York to attend the Art Students League to study painting. Hackman changed his mind once more and enrolled in the Pasadena Playhouse’s acting program.
Returning to New York, he worked as a truck driver and doorman, among other occupations, as he waited for an acting break alongside other aspirants like Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall. Long Island theater work during the summer led to off-Broadway gigs. Broadway producers started taking notice of Hackman, and he was given high notices in plays like Alan Bates’ Poor Richard and Sandy Dennis’ Any Wednesday.
During a tryout in New Haven for another 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 had brief parts in other movies, such as Hawaii, and starred in early 1960s television series including Naked City and The Defenders.
Beatty remembered Hackman and cast him as the gregarious brother of bank robber Clyde Barrow when he started work on Bonnie and Clyde, which he produced and starred in. Hackman was nominated for an Academy Award for supporting actor, and Pauline Kael in The New Yorker praised his work as the greatest in the movie and a masterfully controlled performance.
Hackman almost made an appearance in The Graduate, another classic 1967 movie. Director Mike Nichols replaced him with Murray Hamilton after deciding he was too young to play Mrs. Robinson’s (Anne Bancroft) cuckolded husband. Two years later, he was considered for the role of Mike Brady, the patriarch of The Brady Bunch, which went on to become one of the most well-known on television. Network executives believed Hackman was too unknown, but producer Sherwood Schwartz wanted him to try out. (The part went to Robert Reed).
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.
Through the years, Hackman kept working, in pictures good and bad. For a time he seemed to be in a contest with Michael Caine for the world s busiest Oscar winner. 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, telling Larry King he had no projects lined up. His only credit in recent years was narrating a Smithsonian Channel documentary, The Unknown Flag Raiser of Iwo Jima.
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. They divorced in the mid-1980s. In 1991 he married Betsy Arakawa, a classical pianist.
When not on film locations, Hackman enjoyed painting, stunt flying, stock car racing and deep sea diving. In his latter years, he wrote novels and lived on his ranch in Sante Fe, 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.
The Associated Press
