Gene Hackman obituary: New Hollywood leading man who became an icon of American cinema

“He has bags under his eyes, and his face has caved in a bit,” wrote Pauline Kael of Gene Hackman. “Maybe that’s why when he lights up, it really means something.”

Kael’s observation illuminates two important aspects of Hackman’s screen persona: his slightly lopsided physiognomy – all broad, solid planes resolving into a sceptical and tender trickster grin – and how it helped him render complex and contradictory emotions tactile in real time. 

Such deceptive expressiveness, yoked to shrewd instincts and disciplined technique, made the California native – who has been found dead at 95 with his wife Betsy Arakawa at their home in New Mexico – an icon of American cinema. A two-time Academy Award winner who worked steadily for nearly six decades before officially confirming his retirement in 2008, Hackman was perhaps the most craggily axiomatic leading man of the New Hollywood; a consistent critical darling and box office draw who redefined the idea of a leading man through his own image. 

“We were constantly told by acting teachers and casting directors that we were ‘character’ actors,” Hackman recalled in a 1988 interview with Film Comment about his apprenticeship at the Pasdena Playhouse, where he honed his craft alongside his friend and fellow future star Dustin Hoffman. “The word ‘character’ denotes something less than attractive… this was drummed into us. I accepted the limitation of always being the third or fourth guy down, and my goals were tiny. But I still wanted to be an actor.”

Hackman’s desires were unlikely by any standard; he began acting in his mid-twenties after serving in the Marines (he’d signed up as a teenager by lying about his age) and working a series of jobs at radio stations across the United States. The unlikeliness of his career’s trajectory directly contextualises his brilliance. Hackman could be wry and charming, but he was also good at anxiety and existential befuddlement; he had a knack for playing characters without reason to believe they might be the heroes of their own stories. Where other performers pushed themselves to physical and behavioural extremes, chasing after transformation or transcendence, Hackman stood his ground. His range was remarkable and deceptive: whether playing melancholy ciphers, sociopathic killers or existentially addled Everymen, he stayed resolutely within himself. 

It was in Pasadena that Hackman says he learned about the importance of interaction with his scene partners. “I didn’t know what it was but it was thrilling,” he said. “I didn’t want to touch it, to examine it too closely, just to do it.” After moving to New York, Hackman built a reputation as a dynamic stage actor; the dismal assessment of a New York Times critic that Hackman seemed “indistinguishably ordinary” serves in retrospect as a strangely apt description of his gifts.

Hackman’s movie debut came in 1964 in Robert Rossen’s Lillith, opposite Warren Beatty, whose instincts as a producer for cultivating talent kicked in immediately. “I thought that Gene was such a natural, honest, brilliant actor that he made me good in our scene together,” Beatty told Entertainment Weekly in 2016.  “I remember thinking, I’m not going to do any other movies without him.” 

Three years later, Hackman popped up in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) as Buck Barrow, the big brother to Beatty’s eponymous bank robber. Crammed into the back of a Model 40 B Ford with the other members of the Barrow gang, Hackman projects a relaxed affability that gradually metastasises into panic once the shooting starts, while his death scene is a small marvel of physical acting, stumbling blindly through the forest like a punch-drunk fighter awaiting some final, far-off bell.

Bonnie and Clyde made Hackman a sought-after commodity; the run of roles that followed in the early 1970s made him a star. William Friedkin had been reluctant to cast Hackman in The French Connection (1971) as the two-fisted narcotics detective Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle, but the movie is unthinkable without his shambolic energy, which seems to emanate from the subconscious of New York City itself. By refusing to romanticise the character’s sense of justice – or sand off the rough edges of his righteousness – Hackman subverted and modernised the lawman archetype. 

Meanwhile, his acting in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) as master wiretapper Harry Caul was simply ahead of its time; as a professional eavesdropper who’s too tightly wound to get off on his own voyeurism, Hackman essayed a spiritual paralysis that feels applicable to our present moment of anxious, compulsive doomscrolling.

Hackman reprised both of his signature roles, in The French Connection II (1975) and Enemy of the State (1998), respectively; the latter, while not technically a sequel to The Conversation, is a superior surveillance thriller that stands as the apex of Hackman’s wry legend-for-hire period in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when he kept giving genre movies jolts of wit and humanity. In David Mamet’s Heist (2001), Hackman’s steely presence inspires the deathless line, delivered perfectly by Delroy Lindo: ”my motherfucker’s so cool, when he goes to sleep, sheep count him.”

Inventorying Hackman’s great performances in the years between is basically a game of pick-em. In recent years critics have stumped hard for his stymied private eye Harry Moesby in Penn’s neo-noir Night Moves (1975), who ends up as the punchline in a dark shaggy-dog story; one could just as easily cite the harried college basketball coach of Hoosiers (1986), the driven FBI investigator in Mississipi Burning (1988), or the sinister senior partner in The Firm (1993). Flamboyant villainy was one of Hackman’s specialties, and he was never funnier than when antagonising morally upright types, from Christopher Reeve’s Superman (1978) to Denzel Washington in Crimson Tide (1995); he won his second Oscar as a vicious, corrupt small-town sheriff in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) and then expertly caricatured his own turn in Sam Raimi’s Old West pastiche The Quick and the Dead (1995).

For millennial viewers, Hackman is probably most familiar as the eponymous and ramshackle patriarch of Wes Anderson’s mock-Salingerian comedy The Royal Tenenbaum (2001). The hilarious irascibility of Hackman’s acting in a part that was written for him was at least partially a by-product of his frustration with Anderson’s working methods, which struck him as peculiar; the director has spoken – affectionately but with palpable shellshock – about their on-set clashes. (It’s probably a coincidence that Hackman named one of the novels he wrote in the years after his retirement Escape from Andersonville – or else a wicked joke).

While not technically Hackman’s final role (that honour goes to 2004’s Welcome to Mooseport), The Royal Tenenbaums played like a valedictory showcase, providing its star with role that hearkened back to past glories while bringing a new vulnerability into view; whether bitterly belittling his adult children or clowning around with his grandsons, Royal is a life force. 

Late in the film, there is a moment when the camera catches Hackman beaming in the midst of mischief that’s too sincere to be acting; it comes from somewhere else. He doesn’t just smile, he lights up – and it means something.

• Gene Hackman, 30 January 1930 to 26 February 2025