A two-time Oscar winner and prolific Hollywood star

Associated Press - A LASTING FORCE Pictured with Raquel Welch and Cloris Leachman 

at the Oscars in 1972, Hackman had a career in Hollywood that spanned more than 40 years.

28 feb 2025 - Los Angeles Times

By Dennis McLellan

After a breakout role in ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ he appeared in nearly 80 films in long career.

Gene Hackman, the Oscar-winning actor who brought a flinty menace to films such as “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The French Connection” and “Unforgiven,” was found dead Wednesday along with his wife in New Mexico, authorities said. He was 95.

The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department said Hackman, his wife, Betsy Arakawa, 64, and their dog were found in their home and an investigation is underway.

Over his long career, Hackman won Academy Awards for portrayals of an obsessed undercover narcotics cop in “The French Connection” and a sadistic western sheriff in “Unforgiven.” He came to fame on the big screen in “Bonnie and Clyde,” the landmark 1967 movie starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the notorious Depression-era bank robbers. His supporting role as Buck Barrow, Clyde’s good-oldboy brother, earned Hackman his first Oscar nomination.

“Because of ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ ” Hackman told The Times in 1968, “quite a few people come up to me, and I’m not the kind of person you come up to — I look so common.”

A 6-foot-2 ex-Marine and barroom brawler with a face he once described as “your everyday mineworker,” Hackman went on to become one of Hollywood’s most prolific stars and continued to appear in films long after turning into what he called an “old man with baggy chins, tired eyes and a receding hairline.”

His film career spanned more than 40 years and nearly 80 films, including “The Conversation,” “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Superman,” “Hoosiers,” “Twice in a Lifetime,” “No Way Out,” “Mississippi Burning,” “The Firm,” “Crimson Tide,” “Get Shorty,” “The Birdcage” and “Absolute Power.”

The stage-trained Broadway alumnus received his second supporting actor Oscar nomination for “I Never Sang for My Father,” a 1970 drama in which he portrayed a middle-aged professor trying to start a new life while dealing with his demanding elderly father, played by Melvyn Douglas.

But it was his 1971 role as New York City cop Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in “The French Connection” that turned the 41-year-old Hackman into a major star and earned him an Oscar for lead actor. The film also was named best picture.

The tough-guy role, for which he donned a porkpie hat, was modeled after New York Police Det. Eddie Egan, whom Hackman and co-star Roy Scheider, in preparing for the film, accompanied on his rounds of heroin “shooting galleries” with his detective partner, Sonny Grosso.

Depicting his character’s tendency for violence early in the film’s production was not easy for Hackman.

“I had to slap this guy around in a squad car, and it was tough for me to really hit him,” he told the Boston Globe in 1995. “I said to Billy Friedkin, the director, ‘I don’t think I can do this.’ And he said, ‘Well, we’ll talk about it.’ And of course we never talked about it. We just went on. For whatever reason, I got more comfortable with the film. Then, after three months, we went back and reshot that scene.

“Of course, after working three months on the streets of New York, I was perfectly able to pop the guy just as hard as they wanted me to. That was a turning point for me.”

The movie became famous for having one of the most spectacular car chases ever filmed: Hackman’s Doyle in a hair-raising pursuit of an elevated train that had been hijacked by a hit man.

Hackman later said he did “only 60%” of the driving for the sequence; the main chase shots were filmed in one take with stunt driver Bill Hickman at the wheel of a Pontiac LeMans that went 90 mph for 26 blocks without stopping.

Hackman began racing sports cars in the mid-’70s. But, he told The Times in 1988, “the driving in ‘The French Connection’ was much more frightening than anything I ever did on a track.”

In 1989, Hackman earned another lead actor Oscar nomination, for his role in “Mississippi Burning” as a 1960s Southern FBI agent investigating the disappearance of three civil rights workers who had been murdered.

He won his second Oscar — for supporting actor — for his performance as Little Bill Daggett, the brutal sheriff in the 1992 western “Unforgiven,” a best picture Oscar winner directed by and starring Clint Eastwood.

He needed Hackman for the role, Eastwood told The Times in 1994, “because he can make an unsympathetic character sympathetic.”

Hackman was “playing a guy who turns out to be a villain, yet he still had a comedic twist to it. He’s a threedimensional villain. You believed he had a point of view and wasn’t just a guy sneering,” Eastwood said.

Eastwood, who also directed Hackman as a philandering U.S. president in the 1997 thriller “Absolute Power,” was a longtime fan.

“He was consistently good even if the picture he was in wasn’t,” Eastwood said in a 2001 interview. “He brought more to it than probably was there in the first place. When you work with him, you appreciate him even more.”

Tony Scott, who directed Hackman in “Enemy of the State” and “Crimson Tide,” told The Times in 2001 that there were “a myriad of colors behind Gene’s eyes and behind his face” that come across on screen. “You feel what is going on inside his head and behind his eyes.”

Sydney Pollack, who directed Hackman as a corrupt lawyer in “The Firm,” told The Times in 1994 that Hackman “always had an element of danger about him. You’re never completely sure of what he’s going to do.”

Hackman said that he didn’t care if a character was “sympathetic or not; that’s not important to me. I want to make you believe this could be a human being.”

As an actor, Hackman was known to keep his distance from other cast members. “It’s better to stay alone or at arm’s length,” he told The Times in 1994. “You’re more apt to be easy with someone if they’re a friend.”

He also avoided giving interviews.

“Well, only because I don’t like talking about myself,” he said. “I guess I’m a private person. For me, acting is a kind of private thing, and I just don’t like sharing it.”

Hackman also was known for having run-ins with directors, including Friedkin.

“We had a challenging relationship, and I would say a difficult one, on ‘The French Connection,’ ” Friedkin told The Times in 2001. “But it was always toward the same result — always toward trying to get the best we could.”

The actor acknowledged that he never had a completely comfortable relationship with directors.

“I’m a funny guy,” he said with his signature chuckle in the 1994 Times interview. “I didn’t have much of a dad, so directors are always authority figures to me.”

Hackman was born in San Bernardino on Jan. 30, 1930, and his family ultimately settled in Danville, Ill. His father, a newspaper pressman, never made enough money to buy a house, so they lived with Hackman’s maternal grandmother.

His relationship with his father was rocky.

“My dad was not a strong guy,” Hackman told The Times in 1988. “He was weak and he would overcome that by being too strong physically, by beating me. I resented it because the punishment didn’t fit the crime.”

His parents’ marriage abruptly ended when Hackman was 13: He was playing in a friend’s yard when his father drove by and gave him a wave that left no doubt in Hackman’s mind that he wasn’t coming back.

“That was kind of tough,” Hackman said. “Thirteen is certainly a very impressionable age, and the way my dad left was not a good idea, just to wave goodbye and not stop, not to say anything. … My brother [Richard] was just 6 weeks old at the time, and suddenly my dad put me in the position of having to be the man of the house. I had a lot of resentment.”

At 16, Hackman joined the Marines. “I didn’t want to be around that house and have that kind of responsibility,” he said. “I suppose I should’ve stayed and done the right thing, but I just had to get out.”

While in the Marines, he had a tour in Asia and was often reprimanded for insubordination. Hackman also volunteered to be a disc jockey and read the news on the military radio station.

After his discharge in 1952, he studied journalism for six months at the University of Illinois, then moved to New York and went into television production. He later worked at stations in Florida and Danville. But then he moved to California to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse, and met a younger actor who became a lifelong friend, Dustin Hoffman.

“I always had it in my head that I wanted to be an actor, but when I was in high school, I was too shy to do anything about it,” Hackman told the Los Angeles Daily News in 2001. “Pasadena was the first time I had the courage to actually get up there on stage and see if I liked it or if it was just some dumb idea.”

In 1988, Hackman told The Times: “If you have some kind of disturbed childhood, you go into acting to exorcise that, to point out who you are. … When I’m given a role that has a lot of darkness in it, it appeals to me.”

After he and Hoffman reportedly were voted “least likely to succeed” at the Pasadena Playhouse, Hackman returned to New York in the late 1950s and began studying Method acting with George Morrison, an alumnus of Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio.

During his years in New York, Hackman palled around with Hoffman and another struggling actor, Robert Duvall, and worked a variety of jobs that included doorman and cab driver.

In 1961, Hackman joined an improvisational troupe directed by Morrison called the Premise; the same year, he made his first appearance in film as a cop in the Depression-era gangster film “Mad Dog Coll.”

His first big break came in 1964 when he appeared on Broadway with Sandy Dennis in the comedy hit “Any Wednesday.”

That year, he also had a small but memorable role in “Lilith,” a film drama starring Beatty, who later said “the best thing about ‘Lilith’ was Gene Hackman.” Beatty remembered him during the casting of “Bonnie and Clyde,” which Beatty produced.

In later years, Hackman was the voice-over announcer in TV and radio commercials for Lowe’s. His final movie credit as an actor was the 2004 comedy “Welcome to Mooseport.” He announced his retirement on Larry King’s show shortly after the film’s release.

Off-screen, his activities included flying airplanes and painting using an approach he described as Manet-style Impressionism. In 1999, he added novelist to his resume.

He wrote three historical novels with Daniel Lenihan, “Wake of the Perdido Star,” “Justice for None” and “Escape From Andersonville.”

With his first wife, Faye, whom he married in 1956, he had three children — Christopher, Elizabeth and Leslie — before divorcing in the 1980s.

A longtime resident of Santa Fe, N.M., where he became an avid cyclist at the age of 88, Hackman married his second wife, classical pianist Betsy Arakawa, in 1991. He is survived by his three children.

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Deaths of Hackman, his wife and dog are called ‘suspicious’

28 Feb 2025 - Los Angeles Times

By Nathan Solis

Authorities are investigating the deaths of Oscarwinning actor Gene Hackman, his wife and their dog at their home in New Mexico after they were discovered by sheriff ’s deputies who felt the circumstances of their death were “suspicious enough in nature” to warrant a deeper look.

There were no signs of obvious blunt-force trauma, carbon monoxide poisoning or forced entry into the home, according to a search warrant filed in the Santa Fe Magistrate Court. While one dog was found dead inside the home, two other dogs were running around the property, and the bodies of Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, showed signs that they had fallen down abruptly, the warrant stated.

Their bodies were discovered in Santa Fe on Wednesday afternoon during a welfare check, officials said. A neighborhood security official saw the two lying unresponsive on the ground, according to the Santa Fe County Sheriff ’s Office.

Deputies with the Sheriff ’s Office found Hackman, 95, Arakawa, 64, and the dog shortly before 2 p.m. Hackman’s and Arakawa’s bodies were found in separate rooms of the house on Old Sunset Trail in Santa Fe, the office announced in a news release.

The arriving deputies believed “the circumstances surrounding the death of the two deceased individuals to be suspicious enough in nature to require a thorough search and investigation,” according to the warrant.

Two maintenance workers reported the discovery, according to the search warrant. The front door to the two-story home was ajar when deputies arrived.

Arakawa’s body was found near a space heater in a bathroom beside the front door, with prescription pills scattered on a countertop nearby. A deputy suspected the heater could have fallen if she abruptly fell to the floor, the warrant said.

The Sheriff ’s Office said a full investigation is underway. The cause of death will be determined by the state Office of the Medical Investigator, officials said, and the case remains open.

An autopsy showed no external trauma to either Hackman or Arakawa.

According to the warrant, deputies found a dead German shepherd in a bathroom closet about 10 to 15 feet from Arakawa’s body, which showed signs of decomposing when discovered, with “mummification in both hands and feet.”

Hackman’s body was found on the floor near the kitchen and appeared to have fallen suddenly, according to the warrant. The deputy found a walking cane and sunglasses near his body. He also showed signs of death similar to Arakawa’s.

Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza told the Santa Fe New Mexican that it was unclear when the couple died. “I want to assure the community and neighborhood that there’s no immediate danger to anyone,” he said.

NBC reported that a neighbor had called authorities out of concern for their welfare.

Deputies found two other dogs on the property, one in the bathroom near Arakawa and the other outside the house, according to the search warrant. The garage was locked, as were other buildings on the property, and there were no signs that the home was “rummaged through or items taken from inside the residence.”

The deputy reported that nothing appeared to be out of place while he was clearing the house, according to the warrant.

The Santa Fe Fire Department did not find any signs of a carbon monoxide leak or poisoning when they tested the home. There were no immediate signs of any issues with the gas line in the home.

Typically, the maintenance workers kept in touch with Arakawa through text messages and phone calls, according to the warrant. They spoke to Hackman and Arakawa two weeks earlier and rarely interacted directly with the couple when doing routine chores around the house.

After the home was deemed safe, the search warrant was executed around 9:30 p.m. Investigators worked overnight at the home.