Gene Hackman obit: How the everyman actor became a reluctant Hollywood icon

American film critic Pauline Kael once described Hackman as “an ordinary man who makes mediocrity fascinating.” It was a backhanded compliment, but she wasn’t wrong. Hackman’s genius lay in the fact that he made us see ourselves in his characters — their frustrations, their quiet rages, their flawed traits. He was, in the end, one of the greatest actors of his generation precisely because he never acted like one.

The man ‘less likely to succeed’

Hackman’s contemporaries — Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro — had the distinctive styles that catapulted them to the consciousness of cinebuffs around the world. Hackman was an altogether different icon. At the peak of his career, critics struggled to classify him. Kael praised his expressive face but stopped short of calling him a movie star. Sue Mengers, the formidable talent agent, dismissed him as an “ugly potato head.” Hackman himself described his screen presence as that of a “big lummox.” And yet, despite — or perhaps because of — this absence of glamour, he became one of the most indispensable actors of his generation.

Hackman was a drifter before he was anything else. Born Eugene Hackman on January 30, 1930, in San Bernardino, California, he was raised in a dysfunctional family; his journalist father left the family when Hackman was young. And he ran toward something — maybe away from something — when he enlisted in the Marines at the age of 16. The military gave him discipline but not direction. After his discharge, he bounced through dead-end jobs, studied journalism at the University of Illinois using the G.I. Bill, and, in his thirties, landed at the Pasadena Playhouse, a Tony Award-winning historic performing arts venue/auditorium. Too old, too craggy, too unspectacular for a world that worshipped golden gods, he was branded “least likely to succeed,” along with his classmate, Hoffman.

The story might have ended there, a brief chapter in the life of a man who never quite found his place. But Hackman was stubborn — his persistence was something that the industry couldn’t ignore. New York in the 1960s was brutal for actors, but Hackman had no illusions of grandeur. He worked off-Broadway, took whatever came his way. Then came Lilith (1964), a tiny role that put him in Warren Beatty’s orbit. Three years later, Beatty cast him as Buck Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and suddenly, Hackman had an Oscar nomination. He was 37, an outsider at the gates of an industry that didn’t know what to do with men like him.

The new American hero

Hollywood wanted leading men to be effortless. Hackman, however, never faked ease. He played failures, bruisers, men who were competent but weary. But the 1970s was the era of the anti-hero, and Hackman thrived in its contradictions. The French Connection (1971) made him a star. He essayed the role of Popeye Doyle, not a clean-cut detective hero but a belligerent, obsessive, morally compromised man, willing to wreck everything in his path in pursuit of justice — or vengeance. Hackman played him with a coiled fury, a man whose righteousness was indistinguishable from his rage. There was nothing charming about him, nothing likable, but Hackman made him impossible to ignore. He won the Oscar, but more than that, he rewrote the rules of what a leading man could be.

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This was a pattern that repeated itself in his greatest roles. Whether it was the defiant priest in The Poseidon Adventure (1972), the paranoid wiretapper Harry Caul in The Conversation (1974) or a blind hermit in Young Frankenstein (1974), Hackman’s characters were deeply flawed men, propelled by instinct rather than nobility. Hackman gave detectives and cowboys, drifters and doomed men a face — creased, sceptical, worn by the world. In The Conversation (1974), he was a surveillance expert who could hear everything but understand nothing. In Night Moves (1975), he played a private eye so tangled in his own failures that solving the mystery hardly mattered.

These were dissections of masculinity, of loneliness, of the spaces between what a man says and what he really means. Even when he played figures of authority — a coach (Hoosiers, 1986), a naval officer (Crimson Tide, 1995), a sadistic sheriff (Unforgiven, 1992; Clint Eastwood’s brutal deconstruction of the Western won him a second Oscar) — he carried a sense of unease. His characters were often men who had once believed in something greater but had long since lost the ability to articulate it.

Perhaps that is why, even when he played ostensibly heroic figures, his energy on screen was forceful but unsteady. Unlike actors who relied on stillness to project power, Hackman thrived in movement — pacing, gesturing, shifting weight from foot to foot as if he could never quite settle. Even his comic roles retained this edge. In The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), one of his final performances, his Royal was a fraud, a conman, an unrepentant rogue — but beneath his mischief was a deep well of loneliness, a man unable to connect with the people he claimed to love.

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The same actor who had terrified audiences as the ruthless cowboy-sheriff Little Bill Daggett in Unforgiven could, in another film, turn that same arrogance into farce. But Hackman wasn’t an arthouse actor. He could go big: after The Poseidon Adventure, he appeared in Superman (1978), as Lex Luthor, a smug, erudite egomaniac. It was a role that could have been pure camp, but he filled it with wit, intelligence and just enough menace to remind you that, yes, this man could win. Hackman was initially reluctant to take the role — he refused to shave his moustache for it until director Richard Donner tricked him into doing so.

A reluctant Hollywood icon

Despite his success, Hackman bristled at the machinery of Hollywood. He once said, “I was trained to be an actor, not a star.” Unlike other actors of his generation, he didn’t develop a signature style or retreat into the protective cocoon of Method acting. He simply did the work. There were misfires. Eureka (1983) remains one of his strangest choices, a film that was visually bold but narratively incoherent. Unforgiven brought more acclaim for Hackman but by then, he had already begun to pull away from the industry.

Hackman’s final years in cinema were varied. He played a corrupt lawyer in The Firm (1993), a hard-nosed submarine captain in Crimson Tide (1995), a manipulative patriarch in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), a conservative senator in The Birdcage (1996), a conservative Senator in Enemy of the State (1998), and a tobacco king with appalling habits in Heartbreakers (2001). He made Runaway Jury (2003), the first and only film in which he and his longtime friend Dustin Hoffman shared scenes. And then he walked away.

His last film was Welcome to Mooseport (2004), a forgettable comedy that he likely forgot before the credits rolled. He was 74 when he announced his retirement in 2004, tired of the grind. Hollywood’s endless cycle of promotion and expectation had never suited him. Unlike actors who stage comebacks, who hunger for one last great role, Hackman was content to let the door close behind him.

Hackman never looked back. He reinvented himself and became a novelist. There is no tragic coda to his story. He left like he arrived — on his own terms. As an actor, Gene Hackman never played to the camera, never pandered to the audience. He once said, “If I start to become a star, I’ll lose contact with the normal guys I play best.” And so, he stayed that guy — the cop, the cowboy, the man with the weary eyes and the iron will.