SANTE FE, NM — Gene Hackman, the prolific and versatile two-time Oscar-winning actor whose career spanned five decades, has died at 95.
He and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, 64, were found dead in their home Wednesday afternoon, the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office said, adding that foul play “is not suspected.
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Universally lauded for his acting skill, Hackman’s everyman quality enabled him to embody a broad range of characters in multiple genres -- from the preening, comical villain Lex Luthor opposite Christopher Reeve in 1978′s “Superman,” to a disgraced high school basketball coach looking for redemption in the 1986 drama “Hoosiers,” to an ultra-conservative senator forced to dress in drag to escape the paparazzi in the 1996 Robin Williams comedy “The Birdcage.”
Yet Hackman particularly excelled in roles that featured him playing flawed authority figures, performances lent extra gravitas by his craggy features, which could morph from pathos to bemusement to menace with a twitch, and his and physically imposing six-feet, two-inch frame. He won his first Academy Award for his role as the dogged New York City police Detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in 1971′s “The French Connection,” and his second 20 years later playing corrupt Sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett in director Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, “Unforgiven.”
Other standout roles include a conflicted surveillance expert in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 suspense thriller “The Conversation”; a hardened FBI agent who pushes ethical boundaries while investigating the murders of three civil rights workers in the 1988 drama “Mississippi Burning”; and Captain Frank Ramsey, the rigid nuclear submarine commander in 1995′s “Crimson Tide,” opposite Denzel Washington.
“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?’” Hackman reflected to GQ magazine in 2011, seven years after his retirement from acting. “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 as an actor and that I could look at and say, ‘Yeah, that’s all right.’”
Hackman appeared in nearly 80 films over four decades, with his final film appearance coming in the 2004 political satire “Welcome to Mooseport.” He received five Academy Award nominations, winning two, as well as two BAFTA Awards out of five career nominations. Hackman was nominated for eight Golden Globe awards and won three, in addition to being presented with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2003 for his “outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment.”
Eugene Allen Hackman was born Jan. 30, 1930, in San Bernardino, California. He grew up in Danville, Illinois, where his father, Eugene Hackman, worked as a pressman for the local newspaper and his mother, Anna, was a waitress. When Hackman was 13, his parents divorced and his father left the family soon after – waving goodbye as he drove past his young son, who was playing at a friend’s house down the street, Hackman later recalled to The New York Times.
“It was so precise. Maybe that’s why I became an actor,” Hackman told Vanity Fair in 2004. “I doubt I would have become so sensitive to human behavior if that hadn’t happened to me as a child – if I hadn’t realized how much one small gesture can mean.”
Hackman lied about his age to enlist in the Marines when he was 16, serving just over four years as a radio operator. He briefly attended college following his discharge with ideas of becoming a journalist, but dropped out after six months to move to New York, working in TV production. A few more moves later, he wound up in Pasadena, California, determined to study acting, inspired by his favorite actor, screen legend James Cagney.
It was while taking classes at the famed Pasadena Playhouse that Hackman met a fellow young actor named Dusty Hoffman, soon to be billed as Dustin. Though their classmates voted them “least likely to succeed,” according to Hackman, he moved to New York, with the younger Hoffman following not long after, the latter sharing an apartment with another struggling young actor, Robert Duvall.
“If we had been at a party with a bunch of unemployed actors and somebody had said, ‘See those three? They’re going to be Hollywood stars,’ the whole place would have erupted, and we would have been part of the laughter,” Hackman told Vanity Fair in 2004 of those early years.
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Hackman supported himself then working the usual odd jobs to pay the bills as he built his resume with increasingly larger roles in film, TV and on stage. His big break came in 1967, when he was cast as Buck Barrow, the younger brother of Warren Beatty’s Clyde Barrow in the hit film “Bonnie and Clyde.” The role earned Hackman a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination.
Higher-profile work immediately followed, with roles in director John Frankenheimer’s “The Gypsy Moths,” opposite Robert Redford in “Downhill Racer,” and in the hard sci-fi thriller “Marooned.” His work in the 1970 drama “I Never Sang for My Father” earned Hackman his second Academy Award nomination in four years.
But it was Hackman’s next role that made him a star – that of the relentless, porkpie hat-wearing New York Police Detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in 1971′s “The French Connection.” The role earned him near universal praise, as well as the Academy Award for Best Actor, and spawned a 1975 sequel in which Hackman also starred.
From 1970 through his retirement from acting in 2004, Gene Hackman starred or otherwise appeared in 67 films, making him one of Hollywood’s most prolific actors. Standout performances included the morally conflicted surveillance expert Harry Caul in Francis Ford Coppola’s acclaimed 1974 suspense thriller “The Conversation,” for which Hackman received a Golden Globe nomination. He further demonstrated his acting range with his next role, a then-uncredited cameo as the blind hermit in the Mel Brooks comedy classic “Young Frankenstein.” His character’s oft-quoted final line – “I was going to make espresso!” – was a Hackman ad-lib.
Hackman played arch-villain Lex Luthor in three “Superman” films, the first in 1978, opposite Christopher Reeve in the title role. In the 1980s, Hackman alternated between leading and supporting roles in dramas, action films, thrillers and more, including the romantic drama “Twice in a Lifetime,” 1987′s action thriller “No Way Out,” opposite Kevin Costner, the beloved sports drama “Hoosiers,” and the critically praised 1988 civil rights drama “Mississippi Burning,” with Willem Dafoe, which earned Hackman his third Golden Globe nomination of the decade and the sixth of his career.
In the ‘90s, Hackman’s film roles included the legal dramas “Class Action” and “The Firm,” the latter opposite Tom Cruise; the comedies “Postcards from the Edge,” “Get Shorty” and “The Birdcage”; and the thrillers “Narrow Margin,” “Extreme Measures,” “Absolute Power,” and “Enemy of the State.” But Hackman’s most celebrated role of that decade was as Sheriff “Little” Bill Dagget in Clint Eastwood’s 1992 box office smash Western “Unforgiven,” for which he won his second Academy Award, one of the four Oscars the film won, including Best Picture and Best Director for Eastwood. “Unforgiven” was one of four Westerns in which Hackman appeared in the ‘90s, which also included the back-to-back films “Geronimo: An American Legend,” “Wyatt Earp,” which re-teamed him with Kevin Costner, and “The Quick and the Dead.”
Hackman began the 2000s with no sign of slowing, with appearances in nine films from 2000 to 2004, including the hit action thriller “Behind Enemy Lines,” the legal thriller “Runaway Jury,” and a Golden Globe-winning performance in the Wes Anderson comedy “The Royal Tenenbaums.” However, after appearing in the 2004 political satire “Welcome to Mooseport,” with Ray Romano in his first starring film role, Hackman quietly retired from acting.
In a July 2004 interview with Larry King, five months after “Welcome to Mooseport” premiered, Hackman responded to King’s question about his next project by declaring that he didn’t have one, adding that “it’s probably all over.” In 2011, Hackman, then 81, told GQ he might consider doing another film “If I could do it in my own house, maybe, without them disturbing anything and just one or two people.”
Hackman spent his retirement writing novels, including a Western, a police thriller and three works of historical fiction. He made few public appearances, preferring instead to spend time at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife, Betsy Arakawa. In 2008, he popped up in an episode of the Food Network show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” as a regular customer of a Santa Fe restaurant featured on the program.
Asked by GQ in that same 2011 interview how he’d like to be remembered, Hackman’s response was simple.
“As a decent actor,” he said. “As someone who tried to portray what was given to them in an honest fashion. I don’t know, beyond that. I don’t think about that often, to be honest. I’m at an age where I should think about it.”
Hackman was married twice, the first time for 30 years to Faye Maltese, with whom he had three children and whom he divorced in 1986. He married Arakawa, a classical pianist 30 years his junior, in 1991.
ABC News’ Carson Blackwelder contributed to this report.
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