Gene Hackman is being fondly remembered as one of the true giants of the screen after the 95-year-old Oscar winner was found dead with his wife at their Santa Fe home on Wednesday.
Hackman didn’t get his first film credit until the age of 31, but he certainly made up for lost time, boasting a five-decade career filled with memorable performances in lead and supporting roles.
Born on Jan. 30, 1930 and raised in Danville, Ill., Hackman was just 10 years old when he decided to be an actor, having sought refuge in movie houses from his abusive father and alcoholic mother.
After serving in the Marines and working all sorts of other gigs, he decided to pursue acting full time. He enrolled in a program at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, where he later said he was voted “least likely to succeed.”
“I was not considered one of their most promising students,” he said in 1988 interview.
But Hackman was determined to prove them wrong.
He eventually moved to New York, where he worked on and off-Broadway and in small roles on TV before landing his big break in Warren Beatty’s “Bonnie and Clyde.” His role as Clyde Barrow’s outgoing brother earned him his first Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
But his first Academy win came with 1971′s “The French Connection,” in which Hackman starred as gristly NYPD Det. Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle — based on real-life Det. Eddie Egan — whose pursuit of a French heroin smuggler turns obsessive.
A review published in the Daily News called the film “pure dynamite,” and Academy Award voters clearly agreed. Along with Hackman’s Oscar for Best Leading Actor, the movie earned four additional wins, including Best Picture.
Popeye Doyle was a cop who “used the N-word … and slapped around suspects,” the late director William Friedkin said in a 2016 interview. “Gene never enjoyed doing that, but he just did it so damn great.”
Coming off his Best Actor victory, Hackman appeared as a preacher in 1972′s star-studded, big-budget disaster movie “The Poseidon Adventure.” Two years later, another Hackman highlight was much different in tone when he played a surveillance expert in Francis Ford Coppola’s somber “The Conversation.”
In a statement following his death, Coppola remembered Hackman as “inspiring and magnificent in his work and complexity.”
Though he’d largely appeared in dramas up until this point, Hackman also had a comedic side. In Mel Brooks’ 1974 hit “Young Frankenstein,” he was hilarious in a cameo as a blind man who lights Peter Boyle’s thumb on fire. Three years later, he put his comic chops to work again as Lex Luthor in the original “Superman.”
“I was very reluctant to do it at first,” Hackman once said of the superhero flick. “I was afraid that my reputation as a serious actor would be tarnished.”
But he needn’t have worried. Hackman was a super smash, and the film was hardly kryptonite to his career. He reprised the villainous role in 1980’s “Superman II” and again in 1987’s “Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.”
Hackman’s string of critical and commercial hits continued with films such as “Hoosiers,” in which his portrayal of a high school basketball coach who leads his team to improbable victory helped the movie transcend Cinderella story clichés.
Two years later, his work as a Civil Rights-era FBI agent in 1988’s “Mississippi Burning” landed him yet another Oscar nomination.
Hackman earned his second and final statue when he won Best Supporting Actor for 1992’s “Unforgiven,” starring and directed by Clint Eastwood, who also won Best Director. The film itself was named Best Picture, thanks in part to Hackman’s powerful portrayal of sadistic Sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett.
“There was no finer actor than Gene,” Eastwood told Variety in the wake of his death. “Intense and instinctive. Never a false note. He was also a dear friend whom I will miss very much.”
Clint Eastwood, left, and Gene Hackman hold the three Oscar won for the film “Unforgiven” at the 65th Annual Academy Awards in Los Angeles, March 29, 1993.
After wrapping production on “Unforgiven,” Hackman returned to his theater roots for Broadway’s “Death and the Maiden,” directed by Mike Nichols and co-starring Richard Dreyfuss and Glenn Close.
“He was generous, he was sharp, he was funny,” Close said in a video sharing her memories of Hackman. “Having the privilege of working with him… I learned from him so much, the discipline of going out on stage eight nights a week and making that play work. It’s something that I treasure and I love him for.”
Back onscreen, others highlights of Hackman’s career included his role as a submarine commander opposite Denzel Washington in “Crimson Tide.” That came out in 1995, the same year he sparkled in the comedy gangster flick “Get Shorty.”
In 1996, he teamed up with Nichols again for “The Birdcage,” brilliantly serving as the straight-laced foil to Robin Williams and Nathan Lane. The laugh-out-loud comedy won them the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast.
“Gene Hackman was my favorite actor,” Lane said in a statement to People. “Getting to watch him up close, it was easy to see why he was one of our greatest. You could never catch him ‘acting.’ Simple and true, thoughtful and soulful, with just a hint of danger.”
Another star turn in Wes Anderson’s 2001 hit “The Royal Tenenbaums” garnered Hackman his third Golden Globe. (He’d previously won for “The French Connection” and “Unforgiven.”) Two years later, the Globes honored him with the Cecil B. DeMille Award for his immense contribution to cinema.
“I never wanted to be anything but an actor,” he said in his acceptance speech. “George Scott had a line in ‘Patton’ that I think is appropriate: ‘God help me, I love it.’”
In 2003, Hackman starred in John Grisham’s “Runaway Jury,” finally getting to make a movie with Dustin Hoffman. The two met more than decades four earlier at the Pasadena Playhouse, and maintained a friendship throughout their lives.
“He brought something unprecedented to our craft, something people didn’t immediately understand as genius,” Hoffman said in a statement to Deadline. “He was expelled from our school after three months for ‘not having talent.’ It was the first time they ever did that. He was that good. Powerful, subtle, brilliant. A giant among actors. I miss him already.”
Hackman retired from acting in 2004 and went on to become an author, writing three novels with undersea archeologist Daniel Lenihan, and two on his own.