Gene Hackman, Oscar-Winning Star of ‘The French Connection,’ Dies at 95
Gene Hackman, the versatile leading man renowned for his smoldering performance as hard-nosed New York City narc Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in The French Connection, has died. He was 95.
The much-admired two-time Oscar winner and his second wife, Betsy Hackman, 64, were found dead Wednesday at their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They had lived in a gated community northeast of the city since the 1980s.
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In a statement to the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper, Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza said, “We can confirm that both Gene Hackman and his wife were found deceased Wednesday afternoon at their residence on Sunset Trail.” One of their three dogs also died.
A search warrant ruled that the deaths were “suspicious enough in nature to require a thorough search and investigation.”
His daughters, Elizabeth and Leslie, and granddaughter Annie noted in a statement that Hackman was “loved and admired by millions around the world for his brilliant acting career, but to us he was always just Dad and Grandpa. We will miss him sorely and are devastated by the loss.”
Hackman, who played gritty and cantankerous characters with a virile, edgy intensity, took home the best actor Oscar for his work in William Friedkin‘s The French Connection (1971) and earned a supporting trophy for his portrayal of sadistic sheriff Little Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992).
He received three other Academy Award nominations: for playing Clyde Barrow’s older brother Buck in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967); for his emotional performance as a son whose aging dad becomes dependent on him in Gilbert Cates’ I Never Sang for My Father (1970); and for his turn as a good ol‘ boy FBI agent in Alan Parker‘s anti-segregation drama Mississippi Burning (1988).
Hackman also was terrific as a driven Olympic coach in Downhill Racer (1969), directed by Michael Ritchie; as a brawling ex-con on the road with Al Pacino in Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow (1973), a performance that he considered the best of his career; as Harry Caul, the paranoid surveillance expert caught up in a murder plot, in Francis Ford Coppola’s masterful The Conversation (1974); and as the win-at-all-costs Indiana high school basketball coach in David Anspaugh’s Hoosiers (1986).
While generally associated with volatile, no-nonsense roles, Hackman also possessed an adroit comic sensibility: witness Young Frankenstein (1974), where he killed it as a blind hermit; Superman (1978), as bad guy Lex Luthor; Get Shorty (1995), playing a sleazy movie producer; The Birdcage (1996), as a right-wing senator for director Mike Nichols; and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), as the patriarch of a dysfunctional family of geniuses created by Wes Anderson.
Hackman’s searing turn as the hyper, gum-smacking Doyle in the documentary-style French Connection distinguished him as a leading man. Friedkin’s first choice for the role had been Jackie Gleason.
The story was based on a 1969 nonfiction book by Robin Moore that described how narcotics detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso dismantled a drug smuggling ring in the early 1960s that netted 120 pounds of heroin. The film also won Academy Awards for best picture, director, adapted screenplay and editing.
In his Oscar acceptance speech, Hackman thanked “Mr. Billy Friedkin, who has already received his prize tonight, but I have to thank him because he really brought me through this when I wanted to quit.”
Eastwood had to convince Hackman to join him on Unforgiven.
‘I don’t want to do another violent picture, I’m tired of it. I’ve been involved with a lot of them,’ ” the director, in a 2009 interview, recalled Hackman telling him. “I said, ‘I know exactly where you are coming from. Read it again, because I think we can make a really great statement against violence and killing if we do this right.'”
Hackman once explained his creative approach by saying, “Each scene, I look for something not written down.”
After being honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2003 Golden Globes and appearing as a former U.S. president who returns to Maine to run for mayor in Welcome to Mooseport (2004), Hackman retired from acting and wrote novels.
Eugene Allen Hackman was born on Jan. 30, 1930, in San Bernardino, California. Raised by his maternal grandmother in Danville, Illinois, after his father abandoned the family, Hackman talked his way into the U.S. Marine Corps at age 16. He trained as a radio operator and did tours as a disc jockey in the Pacific.
Following his discharge, Hackman enrolled briefly at the University of Illinois, studying journalism and television production, and at New York’s School of Radio Technique, which helped him land radio jobs in the Midwest. But at age 30, Hackman decided to become an actor.
Returning to Southern California, he took classes at the Pasadena Playhouse, where he met another actor hopeful, Dustin Hoffman; both were voted “least likely to succeed” by classmates. They set out for New York City in 1956 to pursue work on the stage and at one time roomed with a certified public accountant named Peter Falk and palled around with Robert Duvall. Hackman drove a moving van to make ends meet.
Hackman landed his first stage role in 1958 in an off-Broadway production of Chaparral, then appeared on TV in The United States Steel Hour, The Defenders and Naked City and in an uncredited role in the 1961 film Mad Dog Coll.
His work as Jessica Walter‘s crass husband in Lilith (1964), a psychological drama set in a mental institution that starred Warren Beatty, won Hackman recognition and led to him being cast in Bonnie and Clyde as the buffoonish Buck Barrow.
(Hackman, at age 36 deemed too young for the role, had been fired three weeks into rehearsal for another landmark 1967 film, The Graduate, for which he was to play Hoffman’s potential father-in-law. The part went to Murray Hamilton.)
In 1971, Hackman received his second career supporting actor Oscar nomination for I Never Sang for My Father, starring as a widowed college professor and son of an aging father (Melyvn Douglas) who needs care.
Years after the release of The French Connection, he said, “People on the street still call me Popeye. I wish I could have another hit and a new nickname.”
Hackman was busy in the 1970s — his work also included the disaster film The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and a French Connection sequel — and the regimen left him exhausted. He took a sabbatical at the end of the decade, returning in 1981 to perform in Beatty’s Reds.
He followed with an eclectic range of films, including a comic outing with Barbra Streisand in All Night Long (1981). He played a hard-nosed retired Marine colonel in Uncommon Valor (1983) and high school coach Norman Dale, who leads his team to a miraculous state title, in Hoosiers.
“I took [Hoosiers] at a time that I was desperate for money,” he told GQ in a 2011 interview. “I took it for all the wrong reasons, and it turned out to be one of those films that stick around. I was from that area of the country and knew of that event, strangely enough. We filmed 50 miles from where I was brought up. So it was a bizarre feeling. I never expected the film to have the kind of legs it’s had.”
He also starred along with Kevin Costner in the political thriller No Way Out (1987).
In the early 1990s, Hackman experienced health problems, underwent heart surgery and turned down a chance to play Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
But he was stellar in The Firm (1993), Crimson Tide (1995), Extreme Measures (1996), John Grisham’s The Chamber (1996), as the U.S. president in Absolute Power (1997), again with Eastwood, and Twilight (1998), with Paul Newman and Susan Sarandon.
His more recent films included Enemy of the State (1998), the football comedy The Replacements (2000), Under Suspicion (2000), Behind Enemy Lines (2001) and the David Mamet thriller Heist (2001).
After Hackman and his first wife, Faye Maltese, divorced in 1986, he met Betsy Arakawa, a classically trained pianist, while she was working part-time in a California fitness center. They wed in 1991, and she became stepmother to his daughters and son, Christopher.
“You go through stages in your career that you feel very good about yourself. Then you feel awful, like, ‘Why didn’t I choose something else?'” he said in the GQ interview. “But overall I’m pretty satisfied that I made the right choice when I decided to be an actor. I was lucky to find a few things that I could do well.”
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