Appreciation: A chameleonic everyman with charisma

Everyman actor’s roles defined cinema for decades

28 Feb 2025 - The Washington Post

WASHINGTON POST STAFF

Gene Hackman, who has died at 95, was a stunner in great movies and the best thing in many bad ones — a rumpled, roiling, always complex and often combustible presence who helped define the New Hollywood of the late ’60s and ’ 70s before going on to a varied and generous career. The writers and editors of The Washington Post picked some of their favorite Hackman performances.

‘Bonnie and Clyde’ (1967)

“Bonnie and Clyde” landed as a new kind of violent, of-the-moment but mythically immortal American movie, but with Hackman’s supporting role it more quietly announced the emergence of a new kind of American star: the everyman actor. Watch self-worth. When Hackman was a struggling actor in the 1950s and early 1960s, he was close friends with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall, none of them considered leading men at the time, and certainly not the stuff of which movie stars are made. Yet the times they were a-changing, as someone sang then, and the old gods were falling out of fashion. Audiences, young audiences especially, craved faces and voices that looked like them, talked like them, had doubts and flaws like them.

Hoffman was the first of the new lumpen-stars to break through in “The Graduate” (1967), but Hackman was close behind, with an Oscar nomination for his supporting part as Clyde Barrow’s dimwitted brother Buck in the same year’s “Bonnie and Clyde.” With 1971’s “The French Connection,” he became an above-the-title, bestactor-winning star. His role as the crass, rule-breaking New York police detective “Popeye” Doyle was as far from Hackman’s own gently fastidious personality as can be imagined — which makes the performance, brutal and convincing, that much more remarkable.

From then on, Gene Hackman was Mr. Reliable — no matter whether a particular movie was good (“Night Moves,” 1975) or bad (“Lucky Lady,” also 1975), his presence in it demanded your loyalty and the price of a ticket. He worked hard and often, and if his portrayal of Lex Luthor in three Superman films was proof of a gift for comic villainy, Hackman’s 1992 Academy Award for best supporting actor as Sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” was a reminder that his avuncular smile could serve as a mask for pure evil.

Of the many coulda-shoulda-woulda Hackman Oscar nominations that weren’t, I would direct you to a matched pair: “The Conversation” in 1974 and “Hoosiers” in 1986. In neither film does he play a hero or a villain. In both he is an average schmo whose personal values and mettle are tested. In “Hoosiers” he wins, and in “The Conversation” he loses, but it’s the essence of the Hackman persona that “winning” and “losing” are false binaries, not adequate to the task of illuminating the lives we lead and the choices we are often forced to make. It’s a muddle. Few were better at shining a light into the muddle than this actor.

In “The Conversation,” the Francis Ford Coppola masterpiece that came between the first two “Godfather” movies, he plays Harry Caul, a surveillance expert as withdrawn from human society as his last name implies. He keeps his professional secrets to himself and his emotions far from his occasional girlfriend (a young Teri Garr), but the possibility that the young couple (Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams) he has been hired to eavesdrop on may be targeted for murder brings the snail out of his shell, still bruised from a death his inaction caused years before. Things do not turn out as Harry hopes, and “The Conversation” broods with a pessimism and a paranoia that were very much of their era, White House tapes and all. They seem increasingly relevant once more as truth gets lost amid official false narratives, and as the deals that affect us get done where the cameras and microphones can’t quite catch what’s being said.

How do you play an invisible man, a human smudge? Harry’s officious little mustache, his glasses and his headphones serve as walls to keep others at bay, but the actor does something more — he illustrates the impossibility of hiding from oneself in the glimmers of personality that this walking ghost can’t help but leak and in the conscience he pretends not to have. “The Conversation” is a movie about the futility of trying to change the world for the better and also the necessity of it, if you ever want to have a soul. As I said, it’s a movie for our times.

“Hoosiers,” directed by David Anspaugh, is about trying to change a high school basketball team for the better and, in the process, its players, their families, a small town in Indiana and maybe everything else. That this is not an easy task is embodied in the film’s lead character, Norman Dale, the team’s new coach and a man as normal as his name, which is to say he has fallen down more than once and knows that life is the business of standing up again and again, as many times as it takes.

To me, this is the role that captures the essence of Gene Hackman, as an actor and possibly a person: a shy kid from Danville, Illinois, with a bully of a father who abandoned his family one day when the young Gene was 13, waving goodbye as his son was playing in the street. (“It was so precise,” Hackman told Vanity Fair in 2013. “Maybe that’s why I became an actor. I doubt I would have become so sensitive to human behavior if that hadn’t happened to me as a child — if I hadn’t realized how much one small gesture can mean.”)

There are stories of how he was one of the nicest movie stars you’ll ever meet, always willing to talk with fans and remembering the name of a key grip decades after they’d worked together on a film. There are also stories of how irascible Hackman was on the set, how intractable with directors, how he was something of a prima donna. You get all of that in Norman Dale — Hackman’s recognition of the man’s complexity and his forgiveness of it, too, in other people and in himself.

He seemed to know that the truth of “human behavior,” as he called it, is that it’s never one thing, that there’s something mean and small in the kindest moments, and benevolence in the brutality, as uncomfortable and as honest as that sounds. He explored those contradictions for 50 years and in nearly 80 movies. And then he waved goodbye.