Police investigate death of Hackman and wife

Investigation launched after Hackman and wife found dead

28 Feb 2025 - The Guardian

Ed Pilkington, Benjamin Lee, Catherine Shoard

An investigation is under way into the deaths of the Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman and his wife, the pianist Betsy Arakawa, after their bodies were found “in a state of decomposition” along with that of one of their dogs in their New Mexico home, the local sheriff’s department has said.

The local gas provider, the New Mexico Gas Co, was involved in the investigation alongside the Santa Fe county sheriff’s department, the Associated Press reported, raising speculation that carbon monoxide poisoning lay behind the deaths.

But the emergence later yesterday of a search warrant cast doubt on a possible gas leak and raised alternative questions about prescription pills found near Arakawa’s body.

Hackman, 95, and Arakawa, 63, were found by deputies in their house in the Hyde Park area of Santa Fe on Wednesday. The sheriff’s spokesperson said that foul play was not suspected, “however the exact cause of death has not been determined”. The spokesperson said the cause of death was unlikely to be known until autopsies were completed.

Further questions were raised yesterday after TMZ and Variety obtained a search warrant which gave new details about what deputies found on their initial visit. According to the outlet, the search warrant revealed that Hackman and Arakawa had been dead for some time before their bodies were discovered as “the body was in a state of decomposition with bloating in her face and mummification in her hands and feet”.

A prescription bottle was also found on a countertop in the house, with pills scattered around. According to the search warrant, Arakawa was found on the floor of a bathroom near the countertop beside a space heater the deputies believe could have toppled and knocked her over.

Hackman’s body was in the utility room of the house, fully clothed in grey sweatpants and a long-sleeve T-shirt, and a cane. Deputies believe he might have had a sudden fall.

The search warrant indicated no problems with leaking gas were found in the initial search. TMZ quoted the search warrant concluding that the deaths were “suspicious enough in nature to require a thorough search and investigation”.

“All I can say is that we’re in the middle of a preliminary death investigation,” the Santa Fe county sheriff, Adan Mendoza, told the Santa Fe New Mexican. Three German shepherds were at the home at the time that deputies entered the property, one of which was found dead inside a closet in the bathroom about 10-15ft from Arakawa’s body. Deputies reported there were no signs of trauma to the bodies. No suicide note was found, according to the New York Times.

Barbara Lenihan, told the NYT she had spoken with Arakawa in January. At that time Hackman appeared to be becoming more frail but was still active. “They always were somewhat reclusive even though everyone loved to be around them,” she told the newspaper.

Elizabeth Hackman, one of the actor’s three children with his first wife, Faye Maltese, told TMZ the family suspected that carbon monoxide poisoning might be to blame.

Hackman had lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, since the 1980s and married Arakawa in 1991, after meeting her in the gym where she then worked. Little is known of Arakawa’s later career as a classical pianist, although in 2014 Hackman praised her “unwavering, specific readthroughs” of the western novels he later wrote.

Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the couple’s home in a gated community called Old Sunset Trail on Wednesday afternoon to investigate.

The director Francis Ford Coppola was among the first to pay tribute to Hackman, posting a photograph of them on the set of 1974’s The Conversation to Instagram. “The loss of a great artist, always cause for both mourning and celebration: Gene Hackman, a great actor, inspiring and magnificent in his work and complexity,” Coppola wrote. “I mourn his loss, and celebrate his existence and contribution.” Hackman had a 40-year career in film, including performances in The French Connection, Superman and The Royal Tenenbaums, before he retired in 2004. He achieved success relatively late, breaking through in his 30s and going on to embody the antiheroic mien of 1970s Hollywood.

Born in 1930, he joined the marines in the late 1940s, and decided to study acting in the late 1950s. Hackman befriended Dustin Hoffman at the Pasadena Playhouse and the two were voted “the least likely to succeed”. After various bit parts on TV and stage, Hackman made his big screen debut opposite Warren Beatty in the melodrama Lilith in 1964.

Three years later, Hackman made his first real impression with another role alongside Beatty. Playing Buck Barrow in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, he secured his first Oscar nomination, for best supporting actor. In 1971 he took the lead in william

Friedkin’s action thriller The French Connection and graduated to the A-list, thanks to the film’s box office success. Hackman won his first Oscar for best actor for his role as Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle.

“Film-making has always been risky – both physically and emotionally – but I do choose to consider that film a moment in a checkered career of hits and misses,” Hackman said in a 2021 interview.

Hackman had further success in the 70s with roles in The Poseidon Adventure and A Bridge Too Far, and also displayed a talent for comedy with acclaimed turns in Young Frankenstein and Superman, playing the superhero’s nemesis Lex Luthor in the latter.

nomination for Mississippi Burning before winning his second Oscar in 1992 for a role in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.

Hackman’s later film roles included acclaimed comic turns in Heartbreakers and The Royal Tenenbaums. His final film was the 2004 comedy Welcome to Mooseport. In 2008, he confirmed his retirement.

“The straw that broke the camel’s back was actually a stress test that I took in New York,” Hackman said his retirement. “The doctor advised me that my heart wasn’t in the kind of shape that I should be putting it under any stress.”

He added: “I try to take care of myself. I don’t have a lot of fears.

“I have the normal fear of passing away. You know, I guess we all think about that, especially when you get to be a certain age. I want to make sure that my wife and my family are taken care of. Other than that, I don’t have a lot of fears.”

When asked in a 2011 interview how he would describe his life, he said: “‘He tried.’ I think that’d be fairly accurate.”

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The star of every scene he was in, he became the gold standard of characterful acting with heft

28 Feb 2025 - The Guardian

Peter Bradshaw

He always seemed to be wiry, tough and in his 40s or 50s … It doesn’t make sense to call him unassuming when his presence was so potent

As the movie ends, our point of view pans relentlessly like a security camera across the trashed apartment. It has been ripped apart in a doomed attempt to find the bugging device spying on the guy who lives there. With every sweep, the man is seen in the corner, playing the sax.

Gene Hackman’s performance as surveillance expert Harry Caul in Francis Coppola’s paranoid conspiracy drama

The Conversation (1974) was a jewel in his career. Caul is a pro eavesdropper who becomes obsessed with a conversation he records for a mysterious client that, to his horror, reveals a murder plot. The film turns on some variants of intonation and pitch that Harry doesn’t understand until too late.

Hackman’s death marks the end of one of the greatest periods of US cinema: the American new wave. He was the gold standard for this era, ever since Warren Beatty gave him his big break with the role of Buck Barrow in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

He was the character actor who was really a star; in fact the star of every scene he was in. He wasn’t gorgeous like Redford or dangerously sexy like Nicholson, or even puckish like Hoffman; Hackman was normal, but his normality was supercharged.

He was unmissable as the reckless, racist cop Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) and its sequel; masterly as the Rev Scott in Ronald Neame’s classic disaster pic The Poseidon Adventure (1972); superb as the ex-con in Jerry Schatzberg’s Beckettian Scarecrow (1973) and perhaps most impressive as the weary, bewildered private eye in Penn’s Night Moves (1975).

Later, he would be a wittily cast Lex Luthor in the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, and then the mysterious plutocrat Jack McCann in Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka (1983) – his performance in which surely inspired Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood.

Hackman’s career has so much gold in it that it is almost impossible to mine, but there was also his FBI agent Anderson in Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988); his querulous movie director Lowell Kolchek in Mike Nichols’ Postcards from the Edge (1990); and the careworn sheriff Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s western Unforgiven (1992); not to mention the smilingly mysterious senior lawyer opposite Tom Cruise’s newbie in The Firm (1993).

Then there’s his late comic masterpiece – and maybe his flatout masterpiece, full stop: Royal Tenenbaum in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), the disbarred and penniless attorney who fakes stomach cancer so he can move back in with his exwife (an equally brilliant Anjelica Huston) and their grownup kids, eccentric, damaged former child prodigies played by Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow and Luke Wilson.

What was so extraordinary about these performances was that his age never seemed to change: he always seemed to be wiry, tough and somewhere in his 40s or 50s.

Connection – for which he won the best actor Oscar – Hackman had many unmissable scenes in which he did nothing but cruise vigilantly around town. He could do the deadpan, quotidian part of the performance as well as the action side of it: the racist barging into the black bar, the roughing up of suspects, the angry denunciations, and the undercurrent of sadness. This was a performance that laid down the law for all the others he subsequently gave.

to his performance in The Royal Tenenbaums, one that built on his reputation for potent, unimpressed, no-bullshit men but didn’t simply satirise or send up his former career. His tatty, double-breasted chalk-stripe suit, his cigarette in the holder, his glasses, his indomitable grin. His line readings were perfection, especially when he talks to his bewildered grandchildren about their mother, his daughter-in-law, who has died in a plane crash: “Your mother was a terribly attractive woman.”

It doesn’t make sense to call Hackman unassuming when his presence was so potent. For four decades, the performances of Gene Hackman gave form and texture to American cinema.

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Lanre Bakare - The Guardian

 

Tributes to ‘the greatest’

Tributes were paid yesterday to dead along with his wife, the classical pianist Betsy Arakawa, and their dog at their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The director Francis Ford Coppola was among the first, posting a photograph to Instagram of them on the set of the surveillance thriller The Conversation in 1974.

Coppola wrote: “The loss of a great artist, always cause for both mourning and celebration: Gene Hackman a great actor, inspiring and magnificent in his work and complexity. I mourn his loss, and celebrate his existence and contribution.”

The Prince of Wales, who is president of Bafta, said he was “so sad” to hear of the death of Hackman and his wife. In a post to his shared X account with the Princess of Wales, he said: “Hackman was a true genius of film who brought each and every character to life with power, authenticity and star quality.”

alongside Hackman in Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning western Unforgiven and the thriller Under Suspicion, said in a statement that working with the actor was “one of the personal highlights of my career”.

Eastwood released a statement in praise of Hackman: “There was no finer actor than Gene. Intense and instinctive. Never a false note … He was also a dear friend whom I will miss very much.”

Frances Fisher, who also starred with Hackman in Unforgiven, reminisced on Instagram about working with him. “It’s his humble quietude I hold in my heart,” she said.

Nathan Lane, who starred alongside Hackman in hit comedy The Birdcage, shared a statement about the “tremendous privilege” of working with him. “Simple and true, thoughtful and soulful, with just a hint of danger,” he said. “He was as brilliant in comedy as he was in drama and thankfully his film legacy will live on forever.

Tom Hanks wrote: “There has never been a ‘Gene Hackman Type’. There has only been Gene Hackman.”

Antonio Banderas described Hackman’s death as a very “sad day for the cinema’s family”, while Viola Davis said on Instagram how much she admired the actor. “Loved you in everything! The Conversation, The French Connection, The Poseidon Adventure, Unforgiven – tough yet vulnerable. You were one of the greats. God bless those who loved you. Rest well, sir.”

The British director Edgar Wright remembered Hackman on X as “the greatest”, while George Takei called him “one of the true giants of the screen”.

to hear of the death of the twotime Bafta winner and noted his “illustrious” career.