Remembering Gene Hackman

Gene Hackman, who rocketed to fame in 1971 with his Oscar-winning role of hard-nosed New York City narcotics cop Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle in The French Connection, has been found dead at his home in New Mexico together with his wife, Betsy Arakawa, reported DW. The cause of death has not been provided, but investigators say there was no immediate indication of foul play.

Best known for playing cantankerous, often volatile characters who exude a virile and dangerous energy, Hackman was one of a generation of young actors who shook up Hollywood in the 1970s with his gritty, raw approach to performing.

From stage to screen

Born Eugene Alder Hackman on January 30, 1930, Hackman came to acting late. He was 30, after he had been discharged from the US Marine Corps (he had signed up aged 16, trained as a radio operator, and did tours as a disc jockey in the Pacific), that he began to take acting classes at the Pasadena Playhouse in Southern California. There he met another actor hopeful with less-than-film-star looks: Dustin Hoffman. Both were voted "least likely to succeed" by their classmates. Undeterred, they moved out to New York to pursue stage work, for a time rooming together with a certified public accountant named Peter Falk. Hackman drove a moving van to pay the bills.

Hackman got his first stage role in 1958, in an off-Broadway production of Chaparral. TV work followed, and finally films.

His big screen breakthrough came playing Clyde Barrow's older brother, Buck, in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which secured him his first Oscar nomination, for best supporting actor.

He was nominated again for Gilbert Cates' I Never Sang for My Father (1970), playing a son whose aging dad becomes dependent on him. But it was William Friedkin's The French Connection that made Hackman a star.

The cop thriller, about a narc trying to track down an elusive drug smuggler, was revolutionary for its time. Friedkin, who started in documentaries, abandoned film sets to shoot in the streets of New York, creating a new sort of gritty realism, In the film's iconic chase scene, for example, 'Popeye' Doyle races underneath an elevated train through the crowded city streets. A scene was shot with no permits, with the stunt driver, Bill Hickman, racing across Brooklyn at 90 miles an hour. Hackman, with a face that showed highway miles and a gruff manner to match, was a perfect fit for Friedkin's approach.

Years after the film's release, Hackman would recall that "people on the street still call me Popeye. I wish I could have another hit and a new nickname."

Rough edged but with a wink

In the 1970s Hackman made film after film, including big budget disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Francis Ford Coppola's paranoid thriller The Conversation (1974), a French Connection sequel in 1975 and Richard Attenborough's World War II epic A Bridge Too Far (1977).

Most performances played on the hard-nosed, no-nonsense personality perfected in French Connection but Hackman also showed signs of comic genius, as the blind hermit in Mel Brooks' 1974 classic Young Frankenstein or as the smarmy nemesis Lex Luthor in Superman (1978) - the first, and still one of the best, superhero movies.

In later years, he added more serious turns to his repertoire - as high school basketball coach Norman Dale in Hoosiers (1986), the sleazy politician in political thriller No Way Out (1987) or the cynical mobbed-up tax lawyer in The Firm (1993). He'd offer touches of humor that deflated his on-screen persona, playing a sleazy movie producer in Get Shorty (1995), a right-wing senator in The Birdcage (1996) or the stripped-suited patriarch of a dysfunctional family of geniuses in Wes Anderson's delightful The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).

His turn as a racist FBI agent in Alan Parker's anti-segregation drama Mississippi Burning (1988) earned him his second best actor Oscar nomination.

Throughout the 1990s, it was hard to find a single political thriller that didn't rely on Hackman's gravitas and imposing presence, from Crimson Tide (1995) and Extreme Measures (1996), to The Chamber (1996), Absolute Power (1997) or Enemy of the State (1998).

A reluctant star

But Hackman did not wear fame lightly and never seemed comfortable in his role as leading man and Hollywood star. He repeatedly stepped away from the limelight —taking a sabbatical at the end of the 70s, turning down a chance to play Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) —and often agonising about his career choices.

Clint Eastwood had to convince Hackman to take on a role as the violent, if bemused, sheriff Little Bill Daggett in his revisionist Western Unforgiven (1992). Hackman recalled telling Eastwood he didn't want to do a violent picture. "'I'm tired of it. I've been involved with a lot of them,' " the director, in a 2009 interview, recalled Hackman telling him. "I said, 'I know exactly where you are coming from. Read it again, because I think we can make a really great statement against violence and killing if we do this right.'" The role won Hackman his second Oscar, for best supporting actor.

In 2003, after being honored with the Cecil B DeMille Award at the Golden Globes and giving a comic turn in Welcome to Mooseport (2004) as a former US president who runs for mayor in a small town in Maine, Hackman retired from acting to write novels. His books have included historical fictions Wake of the Perdido Star (1999), Justice for None (2004) and Escape from Andersonville (2008), the Western revenge thriller Payback at Morning Peak (2011), and the police thriller Pursuit (2013).