Hollywood’s consummate everyman Gene Hackman has died at the age of 95.
The winner of two Oscars, he was hailed for his performances in films like The French Connection, Unforgiven and The Royal Tenenbaums to name but a few.
Hackman, who never fitted the mould of a Hollywood movie star, but who was one nonetheless, while playing ordinary characters with intensity.passed away according to authorities in New Mexico on Thursday. He was 95.
Mr. Hackman and his wife were found dead on Wednesday at home in Santa Fe, where they had been living, according to a statement from the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department.
Sheriff’s deputies found the bodies of Mr. Hackman; his wife, Betsy Arakawa, 64; and a dog, according to the statement, which said that foul play was not suspected.
Mr. Hackman was nominated for five Academy Awards during a 40-year career in which he appeared in classics Bonnie and Clyde, The French Connection, The Poseidon Adventure, Mississippi Burning, Unforgiven, Superman, Hoosiers and The Royal Tenenbaums.
Eugene Allen Hackman was born in San Bernardino on Jan. 30, 1930. His father, also named Eugene, was a pressman for the local newspaper. His mother, the former Anna Lyda Gray, was a waitress.
He was forever associated with his breakout role, that of the crude, relentless narcotics cop Popeye Doyle in a porkpie hat in the hit 1971 film The French Connection. That performance brought him his first Academy Award, as best actor.
He received an Oscar nomination for his work in Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning in 1988, in which he played an F.B.I. agent investigating the disappearance of three civil rights workers
In 1992 he was lauded for his role as a vicious small-town sheriff in Unforgiven who crosses six-guns with a bounty hunter played by Clint Eastwood, which brought him his second Oscar, as best supporting actor.
By the time the director William Friedkin cast him in The French Connection, he had more than a dozen films under his belt and a second supporting-actor Oscar nomination, for I Never Sang for My Father in 1970, in which he played a widower coping with a demanding parent.
He also had a knack for comedy, as seen in in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein in which he was cast as a blind hermit who unknowingly plays host to the monster, and served him well in later films like The Birdcage in 1996 and The Royal Tenenbaums from 2001.
His work in The Conversation was one of a string of critically acclaimed performances in the 1970s; among the others were his brawling ex-con in Scarecrow (1973) — which he considered the best performance of his career — and his troubled private eye in Night Moves (1975).
His return appearance as Popeye Doyle in “French Connection II” in 1975 was one of four Hackman films that were released that year. By the end of the decade, he decided he’d had enough for a while.
After playing Lex Luthor, nemesis of the Man of Steel, in Superman in 1978 and simultaneously filming his scenes for Superman II, released two years later — Mr. Hackman briefly left Hollywood. He did not make another film until “All Night Long,” a comedy co-starring Barbra Streisand, in 1981.
His streak of well-received performances soon resumed as a high school basketball coach in Hoosiers in 1986 and a government official who accidentally murders his mistress in No Way Out; as a district attorney trying to protect a witness from two hit men in “Narrow Margin” in 1990 and, in “The Birdcage,” a remake of the French comedy La Cage aux Folles, as a conservative, pompous politician whose daughter’s fiancé turns out to have two gay men, one of them a drag performer, as parents.
In 2001, a year after turning 70, Mr. Hackman was seen in five films: the comedy The Heartbreakers, as a tobacco tycoon; The Heist, David Mamet’s story of an elaborately planned robbery, as a master thief contemplating retirement; Behind Enemy Lines, as a naval chief trying to rescue a pilot shot down over Bosnia; The Mexican, a comedy adventure starring Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts, as an imprisoned mob boss; and Wes Anderson’s quirky The Royal Tenenbaums, as the absentee father of three prodigiously talented children.
Mr. Hackman returned to the stage in 1992, opposite Glenn Close and Richard Dreyfuss in Mike Nichols’s production of Death and the Maiden, Ariel Dorfman’s play about a Latin American woman who succeeds in trapping the man she believes had raped and tortured her as a political prisoner years earlier. It was his first appearance on Broadway in 25 years.
He never formally retired, but he told an interviewer in 2008 that he had given it up because he did not want to “keep pressing” and risk “going out on a real sour note.”
Three years later, when an interviewer for GQ magazine told him, “You’ve got to do one more movie,” he said, “If I could do it in my own house, maybe, without them disturbing anything and just one or two people.”
In that same interview, Mr. Hackman was asked to sum up his life in a single phrase. He replied: “‘He tried.”
