Hail And Farewell To Gene Hackman

The C&I crew joins millions of admiring moviegoers in mourning the passing of Gene Hackman, the prodigious and prolific actor who earned Oscars for his impactful performances as an obsessive New York cop in William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) and a brutal small-town lawman in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992).

Hackman was found dead, alongside his wife and dog, at his Santa Fe, New Mexico home on Wednesday. He was 95.

Gene Hackman won an Academy Award for The French Connection.

Born Eugene Allen Hackman in 1930 in San Bernadino, California, Hackman spent his salad days as a stage actor in New York, at one point sharing an apartment with friends Robert Duvall and Dustin Hoffman as the three worked menial jobs while hunting for roles of any sort.

He thought he had landed a major break when, after a string of minor roles in such movies as Lilith (1964), Hawaii (1966) and A Covenant with Death (1967), and TV series such as Hawk (opposite star Burt Reynolds) and Iron Horse (with Dale Robertson), he was cast by director Mike Nichols as the cuckolded Mr. Robertson in The Graduate. Three weeks into rehearsal, however, Nichols decided he was “too young” for the part, and replaced Hackman with Murray Hamilton.

But this temporary setback turned out to be a blessing in disguise: After his dismissal from The Graduate, Hackman was free to reunite with Warren Beatty, with whom he had briefly appeared in Lilith , for a role as bank robber Clyde Barrow’s hotheaded brother and accomplice in Bonnie and Clyde. For his performance in the groundbreaking drama, Hackman earned his first Academy Award nomination, as Best Supporting Actor.

No need for roommates after that.

Gene Hackman made his movie breakthrough opposite Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde.

There was a time, Hackman told me when I interviewed during the New York press junket for Unforgiven, that he thought of acting as a drug. And he admitted that, throughout most of the 1970s, he was hooked.

It was an amazingly productive period for the highly respected actor, who first gained wide attention as the boorish Buck Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), but really didn't hit his stride until he earned an Oscar as Best Actor for The French Connection (1971). After his virtuoso performance as New York cop Popeye Doyle in William Freidkin's hardboiled thriller, Hackman appeared virtually nonstop in more than a dozen features — some cult favorites (The Conversation, Night Moves ), some box-office smashes (The Poseidon Adventure, Superman), a few outright disasters (March or Die, The Domino Principle ), a couple of epics (A Bridge Too Far, Bite the Bullet ), a singularly brutal western (The Hunting Party) and several others.

By the end of the decade, Hackman felt used up, burnt out — and maybe, just maybe, overexposed. So he went cold turkey, and took two years off.

“I thought I was going to paint,'' Hackman told me. “And I had ideas of opening a theater. I had a lot of ideas of what I was going to do.

“And I ended up not doing any of them. I ended up feeling that it was the wrong time for me to stop.”

To paraphrase the Robert Palmer pop tune: Hackman figured he might as well face it, he was addicted to acting.

Or, perhaps more to the point, he decided to seize the moment.

“I think the whole thing about working so much,” Hackman said, “is that, you reach a certain age and a kind of type where you’re very castable. And you can go in a number of ways. So there’s a great deal that's offered to you. And much of it, you can do without it being a detriment to your career.”

Indeed, except for months he spent recovering from an angina attack at the end of the ‘80s, Hackman maintained at a pace that placed him in at least one or two (and sometimes three) movies almost every year until he retired from screen acting after Welcome to Mooseport (2004).

Among his outstanding film credits: Ronald Neame’s The Poseidon Adventure (1972), which cast him as a minister whose faith is sorely tested while he leads fellow passengers to safety aboard a capsized ocean liner; Night Moves (1975), for which he reteamed with Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn to play an ex-football played turned private eye; Richard Brooks’ Bite the Bullet (also 1975), a rousingly old-fashioned western about a cross-country horse race, co-starring James Coburn and Ben Johnson; and Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988), for which he earned another Oscar nomination as an FBI agent investigating the murders of civil rights workers in the 1960s Deep South.

He also played the villainous Lex Luther in Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980); a small-town high school basketball coach who leads his team to glory in Hoosiers (1986); a crusading lawyer in Michael Apted’s Class Action (1991); Brigadier General George Crook opposite Wes Studi’s Geronimo in Walter Hill’s Geronimo: An American Legend (1993);  Nicholas Earp, the demanding father of Wyatt Earp (Kevin Costner) in Lawrence Kasdan’s Wyatt Earp (1994); a tyrannical town boss who operates a deadly dueling competition in Sam Raimi’s 1995 western The Quick and the Dead.

 But wait, there's more: A submarine commander who’s determined to follow orders and ignite World War III unless he’s stopped by a subordinate (Denzel Washington) in Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide (also 1995); a research scientist whose use of human guinea pigs is uncovered by an emergency room doctor in Michael Apted’s seriously under-rated Extreme Measures (1996); and the eccentric paterfamilias of a dysfunctional family in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).

During our 1992 conversation, Hackman grinned at the suggestion that, at times during the ‘70s and ‘80s, it seems only Michael Caine and Gerard Depardieu could challenge him for the title of Hardest Working Actor in The Movies. (Not so long afterwards, a character in the youth-oriented 1994 comedy PCU proposed his theory that “No matter what time it is, 24 hours a day, you can find a Michael Caine or Gene Hackman movie playing on TV.”)

“Yeah,” Hackman agreed, “but some of it, you end up paying for. It's hard to know what to accept, and what not to. Probably, of the 20 some-odd films that I've done in, say, the last 12 years or so, five of them, I shouldn’t have done. Probably, they were mistakes.”

For example? Well, Hackman was too much the consummate professional to speak poorly of past projects and collaborators. But when I mentioned Loose Cannons, the foolish farce in which he played straight man to a manic, multiple-personality Dan Aykroyd, Hackman allowed that, no, that wasn't one for the time capsule.

“I honestly felt at the time that I could make that work,” Hackman said, “with Dan Aykroyd being such a funny guy. But there's only so much you can do as an actor. If it isn’t there, if the story isn’t there, if the plot isn’t there — if there isn’t something to really get involved in — it's difficult.”

By stark contrast, Unforgiven wasn’t merely easy — it was a pleasure.

Starring and directed by Clint Eastwood, the film remains widely admired as a brutal and brooding drama that shines a brilliant illumination on the dark side of Old West myths. Eastwood plays a widowed farmer who used to be a notorious gunfighter, but now insists, “I'm not like that anymore.'” To provide for his children when his fortunes fail, he joins a former comrade (Morgan Freeman) on a journey to a small town where the right men can earn blood money.

But there's a catch: The town's iron-willed sheriff, played by Hackman, has little regard, and evenless mercy, for vigilantes, bounty hunters and other “assassins.”

As Little Bill Daggett, the tyrant with a badge, Hackman explodes into violent rages that might intimidate even Popeye Doyle. But the beauty of the performance — and, Hackman was quick to add, of the script — is the method to his madness. Little Bill is by no means a one-dimensional villain. Rather, he actually sees himself as a righteous man who is duty-bound to uphold the peace.

The trouble is, well, Little Bill gets a little carried away now and then.

“You look at this man,” Hackman said, “and you realize he has no concept of who he is.

“When Clint plays these kinds of tough guys, he's probably much cooler than my character is. I think my character is much more out of control.”

Hackman enjoyed working opposite Eastwood the actor, and respected the understatement of Eastwood the director.

“We didn’t talk much about my character, other than the obvious things,” Hackman said. “I think Clint probably is the kind of director who’s smart enough to know that if you hire actors of a certain level, you don’t really need to tell them a lot.

“Really, I can’t remember us talking about anything other than, ‘Maybe if you stood over there a little further,’ that kind of thing. Most good directors, that's the kind of direction they give you: ‘Move over here,' or ‘Move over there.’”

At the time of our conversation,  while he was appearing on Broadway with Glenn Close and Richard Dreyfuss in Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden, Hackman said he had no idea what he would move over to next. But he was fairly certain that he wouldn’t have to wait long before he was back before the cameras. He seldom did.

“I guess acting is still a drug,” Hackman told me. “But not for me, not anymore. To me, it’s just a job.

“And I enjoy doing it.”