Gene Hackman, whose authenticity and authority onscreen gave him the stature of a leading man in a career he built as a character actor, is dead at age 95. Variety reports that Hackman, along with his wife, classical pianist Betsy Arakawa (age 63), were found dead inside their Santa Fe, New Mexico home on Wednesday afternoon. Variety notes that “there is no immediate indication of foul play, per authorities, though the Sheriff’s office did not immediately provide a cause of death.”
Any effort to count our greatest film actors on one hand needs to include Hackman. David Fincher — who had unsuccessfully sought to put him in “Seven” — recently opined, “He might be the greatest motion picture actor of all time.”
Known for a gaze that seemed to drill into our witnessing of it, going to a place deeper than most actors could reach, Hackman was capable of an intimidating brusqueness — but also a convincing tenderness. He was perhaps at his strongest when portraying a character, sometimes an anti-hero, with a mission. If he had misgivings about the racism and casual cruelties of unforgettably thuggish cop Popeye Doyle in 1971’s “The French Connection” (bringing an Oscar win for Best Actor), he insistently engaged his characters’ inner demons — as in near-psychotic sheriff Little Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s 1992 “Unforgiven” (an Oscar win for Best Supporting Actor).
He could also, as in his work with Francis Ford Coppola on what he called a “director-crafted” performance for “The Conversation,” wrangle with the demons supplied by a screenwriter and/or director and make them his own. The quiet legend was that he could be demanding in a story conference, rehearsal, or on set; he wanted to know the logic — and that old bugaboo, the motivation — for even the most detailed acting brushstrokes.
An early landmark in utilizing his own inner life came with 1970’s “I Never Sang for My Father” where he earned a Supporting Actor nom opposite Melvyn Douglas’ overbearing, truculent paternal figure. Douglas lashed out at fictional son Hackman’s expert restraint that we watch turn to sorrowful anger. The pathos of the original stage play was intact as delivered in Hackman’s stately but affecting, closing voiceover: “Still, when I hear the word ‘father,’ it matters.”
That performance surely derived some of its depth from Hackman’s own story, which, despite his lifelong inclination toward privacy, he freely shared at times. His father had largely abandoned the family when Hackman was 13. Hackman would attribute his actor’s knowledge of the power of small gestures to the single farewell wave his father gave as he drove down their block to leave forever: “I hadn’t realized how much one small gesture can mean,” he once said, looking back on it. “Maybe that’s why I became an actor.”
Their connection never really re-grew and yet, he said on stage at his “Inside the Actors’ Studio” interview, “I loved him right to the end.”
“Beautifully Controlled”
Eugene Allen Hackman (he has a brother Richard, who held some fringe film jobs) was born in San Bernardino, California, on January 30, 1930. The family moved frequently — Hackman attended four different high schools — mostly around the Midwest. A fan of James Cagney since childhood trips to the local cinema with his mom, at 16 he joined the Marines for “the adventure.” He served four-plus years as a radio operator, and was stationed in China as the Communist Revolution played out circa 1949. His scuffling days as an an actor famously included friendships with Dustin Hoffman (the duo were mutually tagged as “least likely to succeed” by their Pasadena Playhouse acting peers, though both also studied under acting maven Lee Strasberg) and Robert Duvall. He survived as a uniformed doorman and other odd jobs, finding spot TV and stage work until his roles on the New York stage in a string of light comedies caught director Robert Rossen’s attention, and also his co-star Warren Beatty’s interest.
The key break came in 1967 with “Bonnie and Clyde,” which showed him as brother Buck Barrow to Beatty’s Clyde. Buck is a loquacious, gladhanding oaf who has a boring way with a witty story, and is marked for death. “Clyde and his good-natured brother are so shallow they never think much about anything,” wrote Pauline Kael in her nearly 9,000-word October 1967 review that kicked off her long run at the New Yorker, “yet they suffer and die.” If the film “put the sting back in death,” as Kael concluded, Hackman’s work helped dictate that she saw his turn as “a beautifully controlled performance, the best in the film.”
From the present day, it’s easy to neglect what a chaotic world the tragicomic, bloody bank jobs reflected. Per The Independent years later, “It was immediately apparent to most people that `Bonnie and Clyde’ was a zeitgeist picture, reflecting a troubled America tormented by an impossible war in Vietnam.”
Indeed, Oscar noms for Hackman tended to come with a certain societal impact: 1974’s “The Conversation” made his tormented, meticulously paranoid character Harry Caul a stand-in for a widening sense of the dawning end of privacy; and 1988’s “Mississippi Burning” achieved wide popularity in a country that in years since, would seem to be backsliding into racism, rather than effacing it as Hackman and Willem Dafoe’s F.B.I. agents sought to do; “Reds,” though Hackman was not nominated for his small role another shoot he found “difficult,” delved into decades of complex America political mores.
A bit of an anomaly for Hackman — though he’d played high school basketball and been partly raised near the site of the true-life feel-good story — was the durable if slightly cornball 1986 classic “Hoosiers”: “I was desperate for money,” said Hackman, who did have periods where he enjoyed more respect than jobs. “I took it for all the wrong reasons, and it turned out to be one of those films that stick around.” His empathy as an embattled coach gave co-star Dennis Hopper the foil that brought Hopper a Supporting Actor nom.
What might have been seen as stretches for Hackman’s persona (however mutable he had shown it to be) reliably tended to work fine, as with his turn as a latter-day Popeye Doyle in a grim European chapter (“French Connection II,” 1975) as he sufferingly kicked heroin. He’d even surprise us with the likes of the heroic Reverend figure he played in 1972’s “Poseidon Adventure” or genre exercises he improved like 1975’s reunion with director Arthur Penn for “Night Moves,” and he seldom could be carped at for more than being the best thing in a so-so film. His performances would steadily and almost stealthily find fans, such as his cameo in “Young Frankenstein” as a blind hermit with a cook fire, who attempts to befriend Peter Boyle’s monster on a tear. The encounter ends with the monster fleeing to what was reportedly Hackman’s ad lib: “Where are you going? I was going to make espresso.”
Hackman’s aggravation early on that directors didn’t seek out and exploit his comic and even improv talents was handled unforgettably in his portrayal of Superman villain Lex Luthor, a flamboyant oaf of Trumpian proportions. (“People will always need land and they will pay through the nose to get it,” Luthor advises Valerie Perrine’s Miss Teschmacher).
Had we known Hackman was migrating toward a glidepath out of his metier (especially after a dubious stress test by his doctor), we might have shown more appreciation for his series of 1990s efforts, including “The Firm,” “The Chamber,” “Wyatt Earp,” “The Quick and the Dead,” “Crimson Tide” and “Absolute Power.” In a sort of reprise of the themes of “The Conversation,” Hackman (a declared Democrat but also a Ronald Reagan fan) elevated what could have been a potboiler thriller with the intriguing “Enemy of the State.” Few might have predicted he would bring a winning subtlety to an outright, if sweet-tempered, comedy in the ensemble with Robin Williams and Nathan Lane in Mike Nichols’ “The Birdcage.” Having bounced Hackman from “The Graduate” because he was too youthful (and possibly too demanding) a 37-year-old, Nichols made good use of him in “The Birdcage” and “Postcards from the Edge.”
Still his greatness was to be found first and most in the Everyman roles, where the unpretty face always invoked a sense of middle age, or as he put it, “your everyday mine worker.” He never wanted any more attention than was required to be bankable, or at least employable: “If you look at yourself as a star you’ve already lost something in the portrayal of any human being.”
When Clint Eastwood approached Hackman to play the emotionally savage Little Bill Daggett in “Unforgiven,” the actor riposted that he’d long since portrayed and lived through too much onscreen violence, but was assured the film sought to serve as a corrective parable to all that. Thus enfranchised, Hackman took on Richard Harris’ elegant killer English Bob with gusto, mixing in a bravura oratorical gavotte with ample kicks to the ribs, and summoning the Best Supporting Actor trophy. As he always did, Hackman finds that his characters have their reasons: “I don’t deserve this,” he uselessly tells Eastwood’s avenger when Clint has the drop on him, “I was building a house.”
Again, autobiography surfaces — Hackman, through his two marriages and three offspring, acquired and avidly refurbished an array of houses, notably in California’s Montecito and New Mexico’s Santa Fe.
Over the decades he perhaps was most riveting as society’s retributive hammer. If Little Bill shows us man’s demonic side, Hackman was equally memorable and fiercely impassioned as an FBI agent partnered with Willem Dafoe to take on a hornet’s nest of small-town Klan types in “Mississippi Burning.” There’s a clean, eyes-wide-open anger to his character. He doesn’t grasp for nobility — he delivers some of his righteous anger with an anecdote he tells Dafoe, but then adds, underplaying as few can match, that he’s “Just sharing a story about my pappy.” A scene where he takes up the straight razor to scrape the shaving cream and more off a racist ringleader’s face has a relentlessness that’s nicely sold by the pallid discontent of partner Dafoe. Perhaps Dafoe would share some of Kevin Costner’s opinion after the two shot “No Way Out”: “The best actor I ever worked with.”
New generations of filmmakers and fans have discovered Gene Hackman in turn, as evidenced by the experience of Wes Anderson and co-writer Owen Wilson in making him the center of the jitterbugging family saga “The Royal Tenenbaums.” The pair found truth in the legend that Hackman could be “prickly,” and felt that having signed on for less than his typical quote, the actor was a bit curmudgeonly. As Anderson put it, “And so I think maybe when he finally settled on the fact that he was really going to have to do the movie, he had to make it worth his while, somehow. So I think he gave us a lot!”
For all its giddy fun, “Tenenbaums” became yet another outing in which the best thing was Hackman. As New York Times reviewer A.O. Scott found, “Mr. Hackman is an actor of such explosive inventiveness that no mannerisms can contain [his] amazing ability to register belligerence, tenderness, confusion, and guile within the space of a few lines of dialogue. You never know where he’s going, but it always turns out to be exactly the right place.”
Complimented at one stage for his steadily naturalistic take on a particular character, Hackman replied with sincere humility that he simply tried to deliver an essence of what got him involved in the first place: “Well, that’s where the clue is to any creative process — to be able to figure out what is already there. Not to try to embellish.”
Hackman, in his later years, had a summing-up that embodies both his stern work ethic and taps into the source of his quite magical actor’s intelligence. When asked how he would like to be remembered, that tells us everything we need to know about the roots and excellence of his craft: “As someone who tried to portray what was given to them in an honest fashion.”
