Gene Hackman Dies, Aged 95

Legendary American actor and two-time Oscar winner Gene Hackman has died at the age of 95, it has been confirmed. The screen veteran, star of such films as The French Connection, Unforgiven, The Royal Tenenbaums, and the original Superman, was found dead alongside his 63-year-old wife Betsy Arakawa and the couple's dog at the couple's Santa Fe home late on Wednesday afternoon, per The New York Post.

A character actor in the mould of Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and James Cagney, Hackman — over the course of an acting career spanning five decades, 85 movies, and dozens more plays and television shows — demonstrated remarkable range and an ineffable combination of grit and charisma that enabled him to play average Joes, comic book supervillains, no-nonsense cops, and estranged patriarchs that all felt real, all felt alive. Among his contemporaries, the Pacinos, Hoffmans, and De Niros of this world, Hackman measured up and stood tall, and is widely recognised as one of the greatest actors who ever lived.

Eugene Allen Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California on 30 January, 1930. The son of Commercial-News printing press operator Eugene Ezra Hackman and clerk-typist Ann Lydia Elizabeth Hackman, Gene's early years were marked by much movement and tumult, his family ping-ponging from city to city throughout his childhood before settling in Danville, Illinois when Hackman was 13. It was at that age that his father Eugene walked out on the family, a formative moment for young Gene that he'd later cite in interviews as a strange sort of preparation for entering the world of acting. "Dysfunctional families have sired a number of pretty good actors," quipped Hackman in a 2003 interview with The Guardian at the time The Royal Tenenbaums, a movie in which he plays the self-absorbed patriarch of the titular family, was released.

A fan of James Cagney and a thorn in the side of authority figures at Iowa's Storm Lake High School, when Hackman wasn't getting into scrapes, he spent his teenage years nurturing a love for cinema at the local multiplex with his beloved mother. After bailing on high school at 16, Gene lied about his age to enlist in the Marine Corps, where he served for four years undertaking missions in Maoist China, Japan, and Hawaii, continuing to brush up against authority and get himself into close scrapes. It was only after being discharged from the Corps following a motorcycle accident in 1952 that a then-22-year-old Hackman decided to make a beeline for New York and make a proper go of pursuing his thespian aspirations.

New York proved an unforgiving but fortifying experience for Gene, who picked up several jobs to make ends meet without ever quite making that next step in his vocational calling. It would only be when Hackman moved back to California in 1956, with first wife Fay Maltese, that things began to fall into place. At Pasadena Playhouse Theatre’s acting school, Hackman shared classes with a young Dustin Hoffman. And while yes, the distinctly un-Hollywood duo were voted 'Least Likely To Succeed' by their peers and Gene would drop out after just a year, the experience relit a fire in Hackman, who went back to New York and studied his craft under the tutelage of Actors' Studio graduate George Morrison.

Following various bit roles in film and TV, Hackman made a breakthrough in 1964, landing a part in smash hit stage show Any Wednesday and a role alongside Warren Beatty in Lilith. This fortuitous meeting led to Beatty suggesting Gene for the role of outlaw Clyde Barrow's elder brother Buck in 1967's Bonnie And Clyde, which in turn led to Hackman putting in a spirited, fiery performance that resulted in the actor's first of five Oscar nominations. At 37 years of age, Hackman had truly arrived — and with his tenacious way, towering stature, and dirt-beneath-the-nails force of will, once he was there he wasn't going anywhere.

Throughout the rest of the 60s and early 70s, Hackman continued to work steadily across film, TV, and theatre, earning a second Oscar nod in 1970 for his work in I Never Sang For My Father before landing his first Academy Award in 1972 off the back of his tour de force portrayal of NYPD Detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle in William Friedkin classic The French Connection. A workhorse of an actor unlike any other, Hackman followed up his first Oscar win with a slew of roles in iconic 70s pictures, including *deep breath* Cisco Pike, Prime Cut, The Poseidon Adventure, Palme d'Or winners Scarecrow and Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, Young Frankenstein, Night Moves, A Bridge Too Far, and — in a blockbuster star turn — Richard Donner's original 1978 Superman, wherein he played criminal mastermind Lex Luthor. It's a staggeringly wide range of roles in the dizzyingly short span of a single decade, but those movies are linked by a common thread: Gene Hackman plays every last one of 'em, thriller, drama, comedy, or otherwise, with the same verve and intensity, mining his own life experience and shedding any sort of ego he could've justifiably had to elevate his craft and serve the story being told.

Throughout the 80s, Gene Hackman continued to work at a prodigious rate. He had a fling with Barbra Streisand in rom-com All Night Long, reunited with Warren Beatty on historical epic Reds, was the voice of actual God in 1983's Two Of A Kind, starred alongside Matt Dillon in cat-and-mouse thriller Target in 1985, and in 1986 he led Hoosiers, one of the all-time great sports movies. In 1988, Hackman picked up his second Best Actor Oscar nod for his magnetic lead performance in Alan Parker's incendiary civil rights crime drama Mississippi Burning, in which he stars alongside Willem Dafoe and Frances McDormand as Rupert Anderson, an FBI Agent investigating the deaths of three civil rights workers in America's segregated Deep South.

While Hackman's memorable movies as we barrelled towards the new millennium were legion (The Firm, Wyatt Earp, The Quick And The Dead, Crimson Tide, Get Shorty, The Birdcage, Antz, the list goes on...), it was Clint Eastwood's Best Picture winning 1992 revisionist Western Unforgiven — an unimpeachable, melancholic masterwork that did for oaters what Martin Scorsese's The Irishman would later do for mob movies — that landed Gene Hackman his second Oscar, this time for Best Actor. "I swore I would never be involved in a picture with this much violence in it," Hackman, who plays the villainous Sheriff Little Bill in Eastwood's movie, said of Unforgiven when he appeared on Inside The Actors' Studio. "But the more I read it and the more I came to understand the purpose of the film, the more fascinated I became." And fascinated rightly so, as his morally murksome Sheriff Daggett is pivotal to Eastwood's meditation on his nation's history of violence and the blood that fertilised the soil of the modern American landscape.

Heading into his fifth decade in the business, Hackman showed no real sign of slowing, racking up roles alongside Keanu Reeves in The Replacements, Morgan Freeman in Under Suspicion, and Sigourney Weaver in Heartbreakers within the span of the new millennium's first year. For a whole new generation of budding cinephiles, Hackman may however be remembered best for his turn as Royal Tenenbaum in Wes Anderson's cannily titled The Royal Tenenbaums. It's a delightfully eccentric turn in a delightfully eccentric film, and a dryly comedic performance that rightfully landed Hackman a Golden Globe — presumably on the strength of his delivery of the line, "Anybody interested in grabbing a couple of burgers and hittin' the cemetery?" alone.

When Hackman announced his retirement from acting in 2004 at the age of 74, nobody could accuse the prolific acting heavyweight of having not earned a rest. In fact, when Empire spoke to Hackman exclusively back in 2009, the Hollywood legend revealed that hanging up his boots wasn't a professional decision, but rather a health-related one. “The straw that broke the camel’s back was actually a stress test that I took in New York,” Hackman told us at the time, talking from his home in Santa Fe. “The doctor advised me that my heart wasn’t in the kind of shape that I should be putting it under any stress.”

Even though Hackman no longer appeared on our screens after 2004 however, he continued to express his creativity in writing, teaming up with undersea archaeologist Daniel Lenihan on 2004's Justice For None and 2008's Escape From Andersonville before striking out alone in 2011 with Western fictive Payback At Morning Peak. His last book, Pursuit, released in 2013. For Hackman, picking up the pen was the natural next step for the born storyteller. “I think it was a natural transition,” he told us back in '09. “One asks oneself questions as an actor like, ‘where am I coming from? Where am I going? What do I want?’ Those three simple things can carry you a long way as an actor. As a writer, you can start the same way.”

It is hard to put into words the seismic impact Gene Hackman had — and will continue to have — on the world of cinema. Unconventional, uncompromising, and utterly unstoppable, Gene blazed a trail quite unlike any other over the course of one of the most remarkable careers in Hollywood history. And whether you remember him best as Popeye Doyle, Lex Luthor, the scene-stealing blind hermit from Young Frankenstein, Little Bill, Royal Tenenbaum, or any one of his other dozens of roles, that you — and we — will remember him forevermore is something of which you can be damn sure. Our thoughts and condolences are with his friends and family at this difficult time.