One of the most versatile and beloved actors in Hollywood history has died. Gene Hackman, who played parts ranging from comedy to drama, from character work to leading men, and won two Oscars during his long and acclaimed career, was found dead on Wednesday. He was 95 years old.
According to Variety, Hackman, his wife Betsy Arakawa, and their dog, were all discovered dead on Wednesday at the family’s home in New Mexico. Their report claims “there is no immediate indication of foul play, per authorities, though the Sheriff’s office did not immediately provide a cause of death.”
Born in California in 1930, Hackman enlisted in the Marines when he was still a teenager, then studied television production and journalism via the G.I. Bill at the University of Illinois. By the mid-1950s he was an aspiring actor, one of a whole generation of up-and-coming talents who began making waves in the New York theater scene in the 1960s. He did some work in television (and at one point he was up for the role of Mike Brady on The Brady Bunch), and then got his breakthrough — and his first of five Academy Award nomination — as the older brother of Warren Beatty’s Clyde in the watershed 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde.
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By the start of the 1970s, Hackman was one of the most respected and popular actors in Hollywood. He won his first Oscar for 1971’s The French Connection, another hugely popular and influential movie. (It also won the Oscar for Best Picture that year.) In the film, directed by William Friedkin, Hackman played tough New York cop Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle. Hackman later reprised the role in a sequel, 1975’s French Connection II.
After The French Connection, Hackman was a fixture in movie theaters until his retirement from acting in 2004. The list of Hackman’s famous work reads like a list of the best and biggest movies of the last few decades of the 20th century: The Conversation, The Poseidon Adventure, Superman: The Movie, Superman II, Hoosiers, Mississippi Burning, The Firm, Get Shorty, Crimson Tide, The Birdcage, The Royal Tenenbaums, and on and on.
Hackman won his second Oscar in 1992, this time as a supporting actor, for his role as “Little Bill” Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.
Hackman formally retired in 2004, following his role in the comedy Welcome to Mooseport. He spent the next 20 years enjoying retirement and writing — Hackman became an author in 1999 and then wrote several more novels over the next 15 years. Although he narrated several documentaries, he never acted in a fiction film again after Welcome to Mooseport.
Despite two decades of retirement, the strength of Hackman‘s body of work meant that people continued to remember and talk about him — and to hope he might come out of retirement for one final role — right up until the day he died. Now that he’s gone, I suspect Hackman’s reputation will only grow, if it’s even possible for someone who’s already considered one of the greatest actors of his generation to improve their reputation from there.
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