Gene Hackman, who has died aged 95, was one of Hollywood’s most versatile film actors, at his most powerful playing character roles rather than conventional heroes, tempering toughness and sensitivity in edgy portrayals of troubled middle-age.
Although a towering 6ft 2in, muscular and fit, Hackman possessed a weatherbeaten countenance that made him an unlikely leading man: he never looked like a film star and wore, as the critic Peter Biskind noted, “an average mid-Western look”. Early in his career, Time magazine considered him “a sort of blue-collar actor, slightly embarrassed about art but avid about craft”.
Superstardom was thrust upon Hackman after The French Connection (1971), a visceral, fact-based thriller about a New York narcotics squad detective pitted against a murderous drug-smuggling ring. Hackman was the sixth actor to be offered the part and took it only after it was turned down by Steve McQueen, Jackie Gleason, James Caan, Peter Boyle and even the columnist Jimmy Breslin.
He was, however, wholly compelling as chippy cop Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, whose maniacal obsession with destroying the ring’s big players leads to a hell-for-leather car chase beneath an elevated railway in Brooklyn in pursuit of a fugitive hitman aboard a runaway train. The breathtaking sequence, masterfully edited by Jerry Greenberg, was the stomach-churning centrepiece of a film that took the director William Friedkin five wintry weeks to shoot. Though the chase owed much to the skill of stunt driver Bill Hickman, Hackman did some of the driving himself.
Among the rave reviews was one by George Melly in The Observer, who found that “in his greasy hat and with a face showing about as much sensibility as a pig’s bottom, [Hackman] is extraordinarily convincing”. Hackman won the Oscar for Best Actor while the film, perhaps improbably, scooped Best Picture.
Such acclaim brought him a torrent of work in films like the prototypical 1970s disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure, in which he appeared as a zealous clergyman, Cisco Pike and Prime Cut (all 1972). He played a professional eavesdropper in Francis Coppola’s The Conversation and displayed considerable comic chops as the blind man in Mel Brooks’ horror spoof Young Frankenstein (both 1974).
After the inevitable French Connection II (1975), Hackman outlined another confused loner in existential private-eye drama Night Moves (1975). But he courted a younger cohort of fans by playing Lex Luthor, Superman’s archenemy in Superman (1978) and its sequels Superman II (1980) and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987).
While Hackman puzzlingly turned down leading roles in such hits as One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Jaws (both 1975), Network (1976) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), he did accept a stupendous $1.25 million to star in the dismal flop Lucky Lady (1975).
The contract was negotiated by then-agent Sue Mengers, who believed it was a gamechanger that helped rewrite the mathematics of Hollywood. “The minute they paid that money,” she recalled, “Jack Nicholson said: ‘Wait a minute. If Gene Hackman gets that much money, I should get X’. And Warren Beatty says: ‘Well, if Nicholson gets that, I should get X.’ And it became crazed.”
For a while, Hackman’s career became jammed in reverse gear. “I got depressed after a couple of my pictures failed to make money,” he recalled, “and I thought: ‘Hell, I’ll do pictures that will definitely make money and then I’ll have plenty of dough.’”
But his 1983 film Under Fire proved a turning point, convincing him that workmanlike acting rather than money was key. He played a seasoned, cynical foreign correspondent in search of “a nice war, nice hotel, good shrimp”.
Further meaty parts followed in Vietnam adventure Bat*21 (1988); Split Decisions (1988), in which he played father to two boxers; and the film which earned him another Oscar nomination, Mississippi Burning (1988).
In this controversial film about the murder of three civil rights workers amid the uneasy atmosphere of the American Deep South in 1964, Hackman triumphed with his portrayal of the stubborn FBI agent pursuing the killers, a man wrestling with his own identity behind a homely smile.
Eugene Alden Hackman was born on January 30, 1931 in San Bernardino, California, but brought up in the small town of Danville, Illinois, where his father was a journalist on the Danville Commercial News.
Like many Depression-era contemporaries, the young Gene saw Hollywood as an escape route from a dysfunctional childhood. “Acting was something I wanted to do from the time I was ten and saw my first movie,” he later recalled. At 13, his father left home; some years later, his alcoholic mother died in a fire started by an unextinguished cigarette. He considered these early personal traumas to have contributed to his nervy screen persona.
He later explained how he took his rage and made it work for him in films. ‘‘Some of our best screen actors — De Niro, Pacino — look troubled and have that kind of fury. I suppose I do, too. Audiences realise there’s an attitude which says: ‘Don’t screw with me.’” At sixteen, Hackman lied about his age and, against his parents’ wishes, joined the US Marines and was posted to China. He soon regretted the move, proving unsuited to a military career, and left as soon as his three-year term was up.
Returning to civilian life, he supported himself by working as a lorry driver, restaurant doorman and shoe salesman while studying radio technique at the University of Illinois. He took odd jobs in television and learned acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. Never the most promising of students, he was voted the least likely to succeed, along with classmate Dustin Hoffman.
Undaunted, he hitchhiked to New York and talked his way into a summer job at the Gateway Playhouse at Bellport, Long Island. He played in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, eventually landing the role of the young suitor in the comedy Any Wednesday on Broadway in 1964.
He had made his film debut in Mad Dog Coll (1961) but impressed more in a two-minute appearance as a racist, unhappily married to the ex-girlfriend of the hero played by Warren Beatty, in Lilith (1964). But Hackman only began to take acting seriously after meeting Marlon Brando the following year. He told himself that if the schlubby-looking Brando could be a star, so could he.
Hackman and Beatty were reunited in one of the most successful films of the 1960s, Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Playing the part of Clyde Barrow’s brother Buck, Hackman won his first Oscar nomination. Appearances followed as a crooked cop in The Split (1968), an Olympic ski coach in Downhill Racer (1969) and the widowed son of a bullying octogenarian in I Never Sang For My Father (1970), which earned him another nomination before his career-changing role in The French Connection.
For what would prove to be his breakthrough role, Hackman spent several weeks shadowing Eddie Egan, the real-life detective model for “Popeye” Doyle, as he moved around Harlem.
Hackman’s later 1970s films included The Domino Principle, A Bridge Too Far and March or Die (all 1977). After his lucrative Superman payday, he spent a couple of years in semi-retirement before returning to the screen at Beatty’s behest in Reds (1981) and as a doomed prospector in Nic Roeg’s cult drama Eureka (1983).
Between 1985 and 1990 he was the busiest star in Hollywood, always grounding and fleshing out his characters. Critics compared him with Spencer Tracy for his ability to burrow into a sequence and find the human subtext: “He is not simply in a scene,” noted one reviewer, “He’s inside it.”
In 1990, an exhausted Hackman underwent heart surgery, but he returned, triumphantly, as the brutal sheriff in Clint Eastwood’s revisionist Western Unforgiven (1992), a role that won him the Best Supporting Actor Oscar and earned him several major assignments: he was Tom Cruise’s mentor in The Firm (1993), the rogue submarine commander in Crimson Tide (1995), a movie producer in Get Shorty (1995), a corrupt President in Eastwood’s so-so Absolute Power (1997).
He was never more in demand, attempting everything from voicing an ant in nifty digimation Antz (1997) to playing a criminal mastermind in David Mamet’s clever Heist (2001). Yet after humanising the stern patriarch in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), his interest seemed to wane. He clocked up his 100th screen credit with the flimsy comedy Welcome to Mooseport (2004), then passed into unofficial retirement.
He had long been uncomfortable with fame, insisting ‘‘I’m a private person… I like to be as average on the street as I can and not picked out.’’ Offscreen, Hackman was a gifted oil painter and a racing car enthusiast, and he spent his later years writing historical novels, claiming he would only return to acting “if I could do it in my own house, maybe, without them disturbing anything.”
Hackman was found dead at home alongside his second wife, the classical pianist Betsy Arakawa; he is survived by three children – son Christopher and daughters Leslie and Elizabeth – from an earlier marriage to Faye Maltese.
Gene Hackman, born January 30, 1931, died February 26, 2025.
Additional reporting by Alan Stanbrook and the Telegraph Obituaries team.
