Few of Hollywood’s leading actors made such an unlikely journey to stardom as Gene Hackman, who has died aged 95. He had no early contact with show business, came from a fraught family background and had looks that might generously be described as “homely”.
He did not decide on acting as a career until his late 20s and was in his late 30s when he had his breakthrough, as the elder brother in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Yet within four years he had won the first of his two Oscars, playing the cop Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in The French Connection (1971).
While this was his biggest commercial success, his critical status grew with his performance as the paranoid surveillance expert in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974). Although it was a box office flop, it gave him the greatest opportunity of his career. As Harry Caul, a private surveillance expert who becomes involved in corrupt business and murder, resulting in his isolation and near insanity, Hackman brought a tense interior despair and complexity to the movie. He went on to become one of the most prolific and respected character stars of the late 1980s and the 90s.
Hackman acted in about 80 movies. Many were dire, and Empire magazine once described him as “the master of the art of rotten career moves”. But he survived those films, as well as problems with drink, a heart ailment and periods of depression. He admitted that he took many jobs for the money – certainly nothing else could account for his return to the Superman series in 1987 – to support an expensive lifestyle. He enjoyed flying his own planes and maintained homes throughout the US and Europe.
His readiness to accept so much work may have stemmed from a disrupted childhood during the Depression years. Born in San Bernardino, California, he was the son of Lyda (nee Gray), a waiter, and Eugene Hackman. His father, a journalist, in a restless search for employment moved the family from town to town before leaving for good when Gene was 13, upsetting his schooling and life so that he later remarked he never felt he belonged anywhere. He lied about his age and joined the Marines when he was 16, serving an instructive though unhappy few years, mainly in the far east. After a serious motorcycle accident, he was invalided out of the forces and had to find a livelihood.
His attempts included radio (he had gained experience while in the Marines) and painting (he was a talented artist but it remained a hobby, never a career). In 1956 he married a New Yorker, Faye Maltese, and with her support decided to try acting.
They moved to the west coast and Hackman enrolled at the Pasadena Playhouse College of Theatre Arts, where he found himself years older than his fellow students. They included Dustin Hoffman, who later became the Hackmans’ lodger and a lifelong friend. Allegedly the duo were nominated by their fellows as those “least likely to succeed”.
On their return to New York, Faye became a secretary and Hackman took casual jobs between a few off-Broadway plays and occasional television work in episodes of The Defenders and The United States Steel Hour. In his film debut, Mad Dog Coll (1961), he played a cop, and he then appeared in a TV western, Ride With Terror (1963).
He anticipated better from a role in Robert Rossen’s Lilith (1964), which starred Warren Beatty. Despite the film’s subsequent cult status, the initial response to it hardly helped the struggling actor, who by then had a family – a son, Christopher, and daughter, Elizabeth. A Broadway role in Any Wednesday (1964), starring Jason Robards and an unfriendly Sandy Dennis received good notices, leading to him being given eighth billing as a missionary in the turgid movie Hawaii (1966).
Happily, Beatty turned producer for Bonnie and Clyde and, remembering Hackman from Lilith, cast him as Buck Barrow. The violent film set in Texas during the late 20s became a hit and Hackman’s assertive performance gained him an Oscar nomination, as best supporting actor.
Meanwhile, he readily accepted all the offers that came in, from television series to war films, from a part as a detective in The Split (1968) to that of an astronaut in the unmemorable Marooned and a convict in Riot (both 1969). In the same year he was cast opposite Burt Lancaster, who introduced him to the notion of star power, in The Gypsy Moths, and in Downhill Racer, as a ski coach to Robert Redford, a friend from his New York days. He also had a third child, Leslie, and a marriage made increasingly difficult by his relentless schedule.
Critical kudos and a second Oscar nomination came from his role as the son in I Never Sang for My Father (1970). The lack of audience for that sturdy film led to him accepting the execrable Doctors’ Wives (1971) and, the same year, the violent western The Hunting Party – potboilers that provided income and experience. But it was his subsequent success as the truculent detective in William Friedkin’s The French Connection that changed his life.
When Steve McQueen and others rejected the film, Hackman seized the moment and made the unyielding cop on the trail of drug dealers his own. He received an Oscar as best actor and reprised the role in the darker French Connection II (1975). By then he had director approval and chose John Frankenheimer, with whom he had worked successfully on The Gypsy Moths.
Between these thrillers, he was notable in two films released in 1972: Prime Cut, as a vicious gangland boss, and as the lead in the popular film The Poseidon Adventure. Bafta named him best actor for the latter, as they had done the previous year for The French Connection.
A year later, he displayed his versatility as one of two drifters (opposite Al Pacino) in the oddly platonic love story Scarecrow, but the rigour of his role in The Conversation was decidedly absent from the lugubrious Zandy’s Bride (1974). However, compensation came with a cameo as the blind hermit in Young Frankenstein (1974) and then the vast fee for recreating Doyle.
Despite the admiration of his peers and the public, Hackman had a reputation for impatience with the slow process on set and for his refusal to grind the publicity mill. His mood darkened during the rest of the decade, and was not helped by poor choices in 1975, including the thriller Night Moves and the western Bite the Bullet.
Following the highly paid chore of playing the villain Lex Luthor in Superman (1978), Hackman went into semi-retirement. Luckily, his scenes for Superman II (1980) had been completed during the initial shoot and he took time out to paint and sculpt, fly and travel. Only Beatty’s insistence that he play a cameo in Reds (1981) coaxed him back to work.
In 1983 he launched the second phase of his career, playing a jaded reporter in Roger Spottiswoode’s political thriller Under Fire and a colonel in Uncommon Valor, and taking the challenging role of the reclusive billionaire in Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka, the director’s wilful take on both his own The Man Who Fell to Earth and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Eureka was badly distributed and was only rescued from oblivion by BBC television. It took Hackman a while to find his stride, mixing disasters such as Misunderstood (1984) and Superman IV (1987) with successes in Best Shot (released as Hoosiers in the US, 1986) and a villainous secretary of defence in the stylish No Way Out (1987).
It was the fourth of his six films in 1988 that gave him his best role for years, playing the co-investigator of racial murders in the US deep south. Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning received some stick for its alleged inaccuracies, but Hackman enjoyed a tailor-made part, exhibiting a combination of world-weary humanity and wry humour, cloaked by an exterior toughness. If ever there was a time in his career when he almost inherited the mantle of the great Spencer Tracy, this was it. He received the Berlin film festival Silver Bear and another Oscar nomination for the role.
Embarking on the busiest period of his career, when he also returned to the stage, opposite Glenn Close and Richard Dreyfuss in Death and the Maiden on Broadway (1992), Hackman made much of a small role as a film director in Postcards from the Edge, and played the prosecutor in the remake of the noir classic Narrow Margin (both 1990). Including roles as narrator and General Mandible’s voice in Antz (1998), he made 25 appearances in 10 years. One documentary was a tribute to Clint Eastwood, to whom Hackman had reason to be grateful.
In 1992 Eastwood had nagged him into playing the sadistic sheriff Daggett in the sombre Unforgiven. Hackman brought weight and credibility to the pivotal role and received his second Oscar, plus a Bafta and Golden Globe. It started him on a run of westerns – as a brigadier general in Geronimo (1993), Nicholas Earp alongside Kevin Costner in Lawrence Kasdan’s monumental Wyatt Earp (1994), then another evil sheriff in the quirky The Quick and the Dead (1995). In Tony Scott’s cold war thriller Crimson Tide (1995) he was memorable as the hawkish submarine captain who nearly brings about a nuclear war.
He clearly enjoyed playing the sleazy producer in Get Shorty (1995). Relishing his increasing status and workload, he knocked spots off Hugh Grant in Extreme Measures (1996) and responded to the competition offered by Paul Newman in the nostalgic private-eye movie Twilight (1998). Hackman worked increasingly in big-budget movies: as the murderous president in Eastwood’s Absolute Power (1997), and the reclusive surveillance expert in Scott’s Enemy of the State (1998) – where the role and many of the scenes were a homage to The Conversation.
In his own production, the disturbing thriller Under Suspicion (2000), he played a wealthy lawyer being tracked by a dogged detective for a child murder. It was one more in the gallery of latter-day monsters that dominated his output during the period. He cornered the market in introspective, disturbed characters. It was not difficult to see why he had obtained the rights to The Silence of the Lambs, with a view to directing. In the event, Hackman found the material too disturbing and declined to play the lead role under another director.
There were lighter moments, such as his rightwing senator in The Birdcage (1996), a feeble revamp of La Cage aux Folles, and a return to coaching – this time football – in The Replacements (2000). During this busy period he somehow found time to co-write – with Dan Lenihan – his first novel, Wake of the Perdido Star (2000), an adventure story set in the early 19th century, which prompted him to give interviews, something he seldom did on behalf of his movies.
In 2001 he again embarked on a series of big-budget films, beginning with a cameo role in The Mexican, an uneasy blend of romance and black comedy starring Brad Pitt, quickly followed by Heartbreakers, in which Hackman played a cigarette tycoon bamboozled by Sigourney Weaver. In welcome contrast, he was very much the star as a gang leader, Joe, in David Mamet’s smart and complicated Heist – a thriller in which, characteristically for the writer-director, nothing was exactly what it seemed. Hackman was elevated to the rank of admiral in Behind Enemy Lines, a jingoistic and gung-ho war film that was more rewarding financially than artistically.
In one of the best films of his career, Wes Anderson’s witty and poignant The Royal Tenenbaums, Hackman took the lead as Royal, a long-absent father who returns to salvage his erratic family from a complicated domestic dilemma. Boasting a fine cast, it was made with panache and style.
Runaway Jury (2003), adapted from a John Grisham novel, proved efficient entertainment, largely thanks to an original premise and fine performances from Hackman and his friend Hoffman. After a minor comedy, Welcome to Mooseport (2004), Hackman gave a television interview stating that he had no plan to act in future and was going to enjoy a more simple life.
He returned to books, co-authoring three further historical novels with Lenihan. He subsequently worked alone, first writing an energetic western, Payback at Morning Peak (2011) and then a thriller, Pursuit (2013).
His first marriage ended in divorce in 1986. He married Betsy Arakawa, a pianist, in 1991; she was found dead with Hackman at their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His three children survive him.
• Gene (Eugene Allen) Hackman, actor and writer, born 30 January 1930; found dead 26 February 2025
