Legendary actor Gene Hackman has been found dead in his Santa Fe home alongside wife and concert pianist Betsy Arakawa. No foul play is suspected.
Hollywood actor Gene Hackman has passed away at the age of 95. The actor and his wife, the pianist Betsy Arakawa, were both found dead at their Santa Fe home on the 26th February, County Sheriff Adan Mendoza confirmed to local press. A cause of death wasn’t disclosed, though Mendoza added that foul play isn’t suspected.
Hackman was among the great American actors of his generation. Steadily building up his profile in the 50s and 60s with work on Broadway and smaller roles in TV and film, he caught wider attention with his terrific performance as Buck Barrow in Arthur Penn’s generation-defining Bonnie And Clyde in 1967. That turn earned him his first Oscar nomination – one of many such nods across his six-decade career.
His performance as the grizzled cop Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle in 1971’s The French Connection was even more acclaimed (earning him his Best Actor Oscar), and in the decades that followed he showed his versatility in a range of roles and genres. He was a playfully vain Lex Luthor in 1978’s Superman; cerebral and contained as the saxophone-playing surveillance expert Harry Caul in The Conversation (1974); and pugnaciously charismatic among an all-star cast in producer Irwin Allen’s 1972 disaster film, The Poseidon Adventure.
The rest of Hackman’s career was similarly diverse; whatever the scale of the movie, he brought the same level of craft. The weighty dramas Mississippi Burning (1988) and Unforgiven (1992) earned an Oscar nomination and a win respectively, but he was equally adept at comedy, as demonstrated in his turn as Superman's Lex Luthor (which he reprised in Superman II and Superman IV) or Mike Nichols’ 1996 hit, The Birdcage.
Other vintage Hackman performances included his affecting turn as basketball coach Norman Dale in 1986’s Hoosiers, or as private investigator Harry Moseby in the underrated noir thriller, Night Moves, which saw him reunite with director Arthur Penn in 1975.
Hackman ended his spectacular career with the 2004 comedy Welcome To Mooseport, but it’s perhaps Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) that gave him one final signature role. The atmosphere on the set of Anderson’s comedy-drama was said to be tense, but it’s a tension that fed into Hackman’s leading performance as Royal O’Reilly Tenenbaum, the rascal of a father to a chaotic Manhattan family.
Over a career studded with unforgettable performances, Hackman had the charisma of a Hollywood legend but displayed the skill and humanity of a character actor. As he once said himself, “If you look at yourself as a star, you’ve already lost something in the portrayal of any human being.”
