Gene Hackman, actor, 1930-2025

{"text":[[{"start":9.98,"text":"Good looks aren’t everything in screen acting. "},{"start":12.459,"text":"Gene Hackman, who has died at 95, was hardly the most conventionally handsome face in Hollywood, while the voice was a congestive rasp strewn with quirky chuckles and changes of pitch. "}],[{"start":23.25,"text":"All this unusual leading man needed was the world’s worst hat — that unforgettable porkpie in The French Connection — to win the 1972 Best Actor Oscar. "},{"start":31.954,"text":"His browbeating New York police detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle was the anti-hero of the hour and year. "}],[{"start":38.269999999999996,"text":"The actor went even more defiantly dowdy (crumpled raincoat, dowdy suit) for his role as a surveillance expert and conspiracy sleuth in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974). "}],[{"start":50.08,"text":"By his own admission, he wasn’t an actor with a mission: he took what came and seldom pursued coveted roles. "},{"start":56.358999999999995,"text":"Nor did he mouth off about political issues in an age rampant with ideological gab (see Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford). "},{"start":64.227,"text":"But for 30 years, from his hoodlum brother in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to his philandering president in Absolute Power (1997), Hackman was a character actor with a star’s punch and pay-packet. "}],[{"start":77.32,"text":"Born in San Bernardino, California, on January 30 1930, he had a childhood that was as geographically jumbled as his ancestry (Pennsylvania Dutch, English, Scottish). "},{"start":88.07499999999999,"text":"The family moved to Danville, Illinois, where Hackman’s father ran a newspaper printing press before running out on his wife and children: a moment — the casual goodbye wave — his son said he never forgot. "}],[{"start":99.89999999999999,"text":"The young Hackman joined the Marines at 16, serving for four years as a field radio operator. "},{"start":105.66699999999999,"text":"Fulfilling long-nursed ambitions to act, he joined the Pasadena Playhouse in 1956, where he befriended a seven-years-younger Dustin Hoffman. "},{"start":113.87199999999999,"text":"Moving to New York, they formed a room-sharing pool of three with another struggling actor, Robert Duvall. "}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":120.25999999999999,"text":"To add extra farfetchedness to this convergence of future stars, two got famous in the same year. "},{"start":125.77699999999999,"text":"In 1967, Hoffman starred in The Graduate while Hackman turned down a role in the same film to play Warren Beatty’s brother in Bonnie and Clyde. "},{"start":133.719,"text":"The performance won Hackman a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. "},{"start":137.512,"text":"Duvall had already garnered attention in 1962 with a small role in To Kill a Mockingbird). "},{"start":142.84199999999998,"text":"In the next 30 years these three men would notch up 18 Academy Award nominations between them, including five wins. "}],[{"start":150.32999999999998,"text":"Hackman quickly became a volatile, versatile screen powerhouse. "},{"start":154.172,"text":"He was adept alike at stroppy sports coaches (Downhill Racer, 1969), sentimental mid-lifers (I Never Sang for My Father, 1970) or priests on capsized liners (The Poseidon Adventure, 1972). "},{"start":168.152,"text":"The French Connection (1971) was his first commercial superhit as a star. "},{"start":173.40699999999998,"text":"But his own favourite role was his forlornly peppy hobo, opposite a young Al Pacino, in the road movie Scarecrow, winner of the top prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival. "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":183.79,"text":"He was prolific and dependable for the rest of the century. "},{"start":187.069,"text":"Tautly textured villains — Lex Luthor in Superman, the Machiavels and martinets of The Firm, Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State — alternated with tormented everymen whose plain features concealed reserves of tragic humanity. "},{"start":199.31199999999998,"text":"Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka (1983) was a critically spurned curio with a vintage Hackman performance. "}],[{"start":206.48999999999998,"text":"He brought depth to Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975) and Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988), then won a second Oscar, for Best Supporting Actor, in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), playing a corrupt sheriff with dark sadistic menace. "},{"start":222.76899999999998,"text":"In the 1990s and beyond he revealed unsuspected comedy skills in Get Shorty (1995), The Birdcage (1996) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":233.84999999999997,"text":"At the 2003 Golden Globes he was honoured with a Cecil B DeMille award for “outstanding contribution to the entertainment field”. "},{"start":240.79199999999997,"text":"By then he had moved on to another field: fiction writing. "},{"start":244.13399999999996,"text":"With underwater archaeologist David Lenihan he co-authored three historical fiction works. "},{"start":248.73899999999998,"text":"Later he went solo with a Western novel, Payback at Morning Peak (2011), and returned to French Connection territory with the police thriller Pursuit (2013). "},{"start":258.082,"text":"Other non-filmic enthusiasms included amateur motor racing and, continuing into his retirement from movie acting, painting. "}],[{"start":265.54999999999995,"text":"He died alongside his second wife, Betsy Arakawa, whom he married in 1991, and is survived by three children from his first marriage to Faye Maltese. "}],[{"start":274.65,"text":""}]],"url":"https://d33mkcasurz97s.cloudfront.net/album/194626-1740734282.mp3"}