Gene Hackman

Gene Hackman joined the Pasadena Playhouse in 1956, where he and a fellow student named Dustin Hoffman were voted least likely to succeed by their classmates. He went to New York instead. He was thirty-seven when Bonnie and Clyde arrived in 1967, playing Buck Barrow, and it brought a Best Supporting Actor nomination. A second followed for I Never Sang for My Father in 1970. By then he had been working for more than a decade without anybody in particular noticing, which is the ordinary way these careers go.

The French Connection in 1971 is the pivot. Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle is a New York narcotics detective with no charm and an unreasonable amount of persistence, and the film is built around the discomfort of watching him. It won Hackman the Academy Award for Best Actor at the ceremony in 1972 and the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a drama, and a BAFTA the following year, cited jointly with his work in The Poseidon Adventure. He was forty-two and suddenly a leading man, which nobody had planned for.

What he did with the position is the more interesting part. The Conversation in 1974 gave him Harry Caul, a surveillance expert terrified of being listened to, and it is the quietest thing he ever did. Then Lex Luthor across three Superman films from 1978, Hoosiers in 1986, Mississippi Burning in 1988 for a fourth nomination, and Little Bill Daggett in Unforgiven, which took Best Supporting Actor at the ceremony in 1993 along with the Golden Globe and a second BAFTA. Twenty-one years separate the two Oscars.

Then he stopped. The last film was Welcome to Mooseport in 2004, and in 2008 he confirmed he had retired, citing a cardiac stress test that had gone badly. He wrote novels instead and lived in Santa Fe. He died there in February 2025, aged ninety-five. His wife, Betsy Arakawa, is believed to have died on about 11 February of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome; the final autopsy placed his own death on or about 18 February, from heart disease, with advanced Alzheimer's disease a contributing factor. Both were found on 26 February.