Outside the Beltway

Gene Hackman, 1930-1925

The legendary actor is gone at 95.

James Joyner · Thursday, February 27, 2025 · 8 comments

Associated Press, “Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman and his wife and dog found dead in their New Mexico home“

Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman, his wife and their dog were found dead in their New Mexico home, authorities said Thursday.

Foul play was not suspected, but authorities did not release circumstances of their deaths and said an investigation was ongoing.

Hackman, 95, Betsy Arakawa, 63, and their dog were all dead when deputies entered their home to check on their welfare around 1:45 p.m. Wednesday, Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Denise Avila said.

The gruff-but-beloved Hackman was among the finest actors of his generation, appearing as villains, heroes and antiheroes in dozens of dramas, comedies and action films from the 1960s until his retirement in the early 2000s.

He was a five-time Oscar nominee who won for “The French Connection” in 1972 and “Unforgiven” two decades later. His death comes just four days before this year’s ceremony.

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Aside from appearances at awards shows, he was rarely seen in the Hollywood social circuit and retired from acting about 20 years ago. His was the rare Hollywood retirement that actually lasted.

New York Times, “Gene Hackman, Hollywood’s Consummate Everyman, Dies at 95“

Gene Hackman, who never fit the mold of a Hollywood movie star, but who became one all the same, playing seemingly ordinary characters with deceptive subtlety, intensity and often charm in some of the most noted films of the 1970s and ’80s, has died, the authorities in New Mexico said on Thursday. He was 95.

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Mr. Hackman was nominated for five Academy Awards and won two during a 40-year career in which he appeared in films seen and remembered by millions, among them “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The French Connection,” “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Mississippi Burning,” “Unforgiven,” “Superman,” “Hoosiers” and “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

The familiar characterization of Mr. Hackman was that he was Hollywood’s perfect Everyman. But perhaps that was too easy. His characters — convict, sheriff, Klansman, steelworker, spy, minister, war hero, grieving widower, submarine commander, basketball coach, president — defied pigeonholing, as did his shaded portrayals of them.

Still, he did not deny that he had a regular-Joe image, nor did he mind it. He once joked that he looked like “your everyday mine worker.” And he did seem to have been born middle-aged: slightly balding, with strong but unremarkable features neither plain nor handsome, a tall man (6-foot-2) more likely to melt into a crowd than stand out in one.

It was Mr. Hackman’s gift to be able to peel back the layers from characters who carried the weight of middle age.

“Because they’ve been around long enough to experience failure and loss, but not long enough to take it easy, Hackman could play them with a distinctive mix of shadow and light,” Jeremy McCarter wrote in an appraisal of Mr. Hackman’s career in Newsweek in 2010, six years after the release of what turned out to be his last film, the comedy “Welcome to Mooseport,” and two years after he confirmed that he did not plan to make any more movies.

“While some actors congratulate themselves for venturing into the moral gray zone,” Mr. McCarter continued, “Hackman has called it home for so long that we’ve ceased to notice. In his performances, as in life, the good guys aren’t always nice guys, and the villains have charm.”

If the critics had one word for Mr. Hackman as a performer, it was “believable.” He seemed to live his roles, they said, not play them.

“There’s no identifiable quality that makes Mr. Hackman stand out,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times in 1988. “He simply makes himself outstandingly vital and real.”

He avoided self-analysis when he talked about acting. “I don’t like to look real deep at what I do with my characters,” he once said. “It is that strange fear that if you look at something too closely, it goes away.”

Mr. Hackman was forever associated with his breakout role, that of the crude, relentless narcotics cop Popeye Doyle — a grim-faced bloodhound in a porkpie hat — in the hit 1971 film “The French Connection.” That performance brought him his first Academy Award, as best actor.

But that was only one of countless memorable film portraits. He received an Oscar nomination for his work in Alan Parker’s “Mississippi Burning” (1988), in which he played an F.B.I. agent investigating the disappearance of three civil rights workers — a “scratchy, rumpled, down-home-talking redneck, who himself has murder in his heart,” as Vincent Canby wrote in The Times.

In “Unforgiven” (1992), as a vicious small-town sheriff who crosses six-guns with a bounty hunter played by Clint Eastwood, he was a chilling study in sadistic brutality. That performance brought him his second Oscar, as best supporting actor.

Early in his career Mr. Hackman worked on television shows like “Route 66” and “Naked City,” in improvisational theater and in Broadway comedies, including Muriel Resnik’s “Any Wednesday,” with Sandy Dennis, and Jean Kerr’s “Poor Richard,” with Alan Bates and Joanna Pettet. His performance in a bit part in a 1964 Warren Beatty movie, “Lilith,” made a lasting impression on Mr. Beatty, who remembered him when he was producing “Bonnie and Clyde” and looking for someone to play Buck Barrow, the explosive brother of the gangster Clyde Barrow (played by Mr. Beatty). Mr. Hackman’s performance in that film, directed by Arthur Penn and released in 1967, brought him his first Oscar nomination.

By the time the director William Friedkin cast him in “The French Connection,” Mr. Hackman had more than a dozen films under his belt and a second supporting-actor Oscar nomination, for “I Never Sang for My Father” (1970), in which he played a widower coping with a demanding parent (played by Melvyn Douglas).

Not all his roles explored life’s dark side. His knack for comedy, honed on the stage, resurfaced in Mel Brooks’s “Young Frankenstein” (1974), in which he was cast as a blind hermit who unknowingly plays host to the monster, and served him well in later films like “The Birdcage” (1996) and “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001).

Variety, “Gene Hackman and Wife Betsy Arakawa Found Dead in Santa Fe Home; Oscar-Winning Star of ‘French Connection’ and ‘Unforgiven’ Was 95“

Gene Hackman, a two-time Oscar winner for “The French Connection” and “Unforgiven,” and his wife, classical pianist Betsy Arakawa, were found dead Wednesday afternoon in their Santa Fe, N.M. home

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Considered one of the great screen performers of the latter part of the 20th century, the tall, likable Hackman had an amiable grace, easy humor and a surprisingly wide range that made him equally believable in roles as lower-class losers and high-powered executives. Indeed, he played the president of the United States, albeit a homicidal one, in 1997’s “Absolute Power” and a former president in his final feature, “Welcome to Mooseport.”

Like the great character movie stars of an earlier era, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, Hackman transcended any limitations by the sheer force of his presence, becoming as identifiable and admired as some of his higher-paid contemporaries such as Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman.

After years in stage and television, Hackman broke out with his role as Clyde Barrow’s explosive older brother in the 1967 film “Bonnie and Clyde,” which brought him his first Oscar nomination in supporting actor. Pauline Kael dubbed his performance the best in the film. He soon after did an about-face as Melvyn Douglas’ timid son in “I Never Sang for My Father” and drew a second Oscar nom.

But his role as Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, the rogue cop in the Oscar best picture winner “The French Connection,” defined him and cast his trajectory as one of the American cinema’s great actors. His performance in the 1971 thriller nabbed him an Academy Award for best actor. The following years saw Hackman end up in enough poorly regarded films to doom most actors (from “March or Die” to “Banning” and “Bat 21”); he also reportedly turned down assignments in “Ordinary People,” “Apocalypse Now” (the Robert Duvall role), “Network” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

Hackman always had a surprise hit up his sleeve, as in films like “The French Connection II,” “The Firm” and even “The Poseidon Adventure.”

Hackman delivered an impressive array of performances that have only grown in stature over time. His Harry Caul in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” is every bit as strong and well delineated now, as when the film debuted in 1974. The same is true of his stoic promoter in the Michael Ritchie ski film “Downhill Racer.”

Hackman was memorable as a journalist caught in the intrigue of Central American revolution in Roger Spottiswoode’s “Under Fire”; he shone in Arthur Penn’s suspenseful “Night Moves”; and he was cracklingly funny as the canny Lex Luthor in the “Superman” films. The actor brought strength to the role of a basketball coach in “Hoosiers” and wry humor to the FBI agent in “Mississippi Burning” (which brought him his fourth Oscar nomination and his second for a lead role).

Into his early 70s, even after he was burdened with heart trouble, he scored with impressive characterizations in roles both big and small. His onscreen confidence seemed to grow, not diminish with age — the true sign of a great performer. He often stole scenes from bigger stars of the day, as he demonstrated opposite Meryl Streep in “Postcards From the Edge” and Tom Cruise in “The Firm.” And when he was pitted against formidable opponents, such as Denzel Washington in “Crimson Tide” and Nick Nolte in “Under Fire,” there were fireworks. When he got even half a chance, he was never less than memorable.

In 1993, he won a second Oscar for his supporting performance as a vicious sheriff in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven,” another best picture Oscar winner. The year before, Hackman starred on Broadway, after an absence of decades, in Ariel Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden.”

He was very busy on the bigscreen in 1995: In the submarine thriller “Crimson Tide,” he turned in a first-rate toplining performance; he was just as good as the scathingly comic scalawag producer in “Get Shorty”; and he was an enjoyable villain in the Sharon Stone Western “The Quick and the Dead.” He scored a comic bulls-eye in “The Birdcage” the following year, as an uptight right-wing U.S. senator.

In 1998, Hackman returned to the surveillance thriller for Tony Scott’s “Enemy of the State,” a spiritual albeit more explosive sequel to Coppola’s “The Conversation” in which the veteran teamed with then-rising star Will Smith. He later played the shifty dad to Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow and Luke Wilson in Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums,” giving the auteur a memorable, old guard lead turn for his third feature.

After starring in the 2003 feature “Runaway Jury” (his third John Grisham adaptation), Hackman retired with his final credit being “Welcome to Mooseport” in 2004.

Usually when a man of this stature dies at 95, the headlines and ledes are encomia to a grand career. Alas, the strange circumstances of his death naturally took over here.

He was 35 and a well-established actor when I was born, so he’s one of those guys who had simply always been around for me. I haven’t come close to seeing all of his movies but he was in so many that I enjoyed.

Since it was the first I saw in the theater—and Steven Taylor and KingDaddy were just discussing it on their podcast—I choose his turn as Lex Luthor in the Christopher Reeve Superman movies to illustrate the post. Hoosiers, Unforgiven, Crimson Tide, and Get Shorty were among my favorites.