SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — Prolific Oscar-winning actor Jean Hackman, who studied portraits, has been humiliated by a passive hero from a villain, becoming one of the industry’s most respected and honored performers, found dead at home with his wife and dog. He was 95 years old.
No foul play was suspected, but authorities did not announce the circumstances of their deaths and said an investigation was ongoing.
Actor Jean Hackman will visit his wife’s Betsie Arakawa Awards for the 60th Annual Golden Globe Awards held in Beverly Hills, California on Sunday, January 19, 2003. 30th 2010 (AP Photo, File) Actor Jean Hackman begins on February 5th 1983 to begin practice at the Toyota Celica at Daytona International Speedway in preparation for the Daytona 24 Hour Endurack Race. This race marks the beginning of Hickman’s career as a professional driver. (AP Photo/Bob Self, File) The file photo from January 19, 2003 shows actor Jean Hackman (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill, File) at the 60th Annual Golden Globe Awards held in Beverly Hills, California. (AP Photo/Tom Strickland, file) Gene Hackman was awarded the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 60th Annual Golden Globe Awards held in Beverly Hills, California on Sunday, January 19, 2003. (AP Photo/File) Actor Jean Hackman discusses the effect of the Academy Award nomination on his career on March 24, 1972 (AP Photo/George Brich, File)
Hackman was found dead with his wife Betsy Arakawa and their dogs, along with his dog, along with his dog, and the dog, according to Dennis Avila, a spokesman for the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office.
Hackman was a frequent and versatile figure on screen from the 1960s until his retirement. His dozens of films include breakout performances from Academy Awards’ favorites, The French Connection, Unforgiven, and Bonnie and Clyde. This is the classic farce of “Young Frankenstein” as the turn of the “Superman” comic book villain Lex Luthor and as the title character of Wes Anderson’s 2001 “Royal Tenen Balm.”
He seemed to be able to play any role, whether he was a tense clown in “Bird Cage,” a college coach who finds reds in his sentimental favorite “Hoosiers,” or an expert on secret surveillance in Francis Ford Coppola’s Watergate-era release, “The Conversation.”
Though not self-effective and fashionable, Hackman held a special position in Hollywood. Everyman, actor, curmudgeon, heir to Spencer Tracy as a passive celebrity. He did his job and did it very well, embodying the spirit of making others worried about his image. Beyond his mandatory appearance at award rituals, he was rarely seen on social circuits and had no daring secrets to the business side of show business.
“Actors tend to be shy,” he told the film in 1988.
He was an early retiree, essentially by the mid-’70s, using films and a slow Bloomer. Hackman was 35 years old when he was cast in “Bonnie and Clyde,” and was 35 years old when he won his first Oscar as “Popeye” Doyle of New York, who bends the rules over tracking down drug smugglers in Manhattan.
Jackie Gleeson, Steve McQueen and Peter Boyle were among the actors considered for Doyle. Hackman was a minor star of the time, and doesn’t seem to have the glamorous personality that the role demanded. The actor himself feared that he was wrong. A few weeks of night patrols in police car Harlem have reassured him.
In one of the first scenes in “French Connections,” Hackman had to slap the suspect. The actor realized that he failed to achieve the strength that Scene needed, and asked director William Friedkin for another opportunity. The scene was filmed at the end of filming, and by then Hackman was immersed in the Loose Cannon character of Popeye Doyle. Friedkin will remember that 37 takes to get the scene right.
“I had to arouse anger at the genes I had inside him. He felt a bit embarrassed and didn’t want to revisit,” Friedkin told a 2012 Los Angeles book review.
The most famous sequences were dangerously realistic. Doyle’s speed under an elevated subway truck, his brown Pontiac (driven by a stuntman) is screeching into areas where the filmmakers had not received permission. When Doyle crashes into a white Ford, it’s not a stuntman driving another car, but a New York City resident who didn’t know the film was being made.
Hackman also resisted the role that brought him his second Oscar. When Clint Eastwood first offered him a small Bill Daggett, Hackman, the boss of the corrupt town, refused. However, he realized that Eastwood was planning to create another kind of West, not a celebration of violence, but a critique. The film won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1992.
“For his achievements and my joy, he spoke to me,” Hackman said of Eastwood in an interview with the American Film Institute.
Hackman played Super Vilan Rex Luther across from Christopher Reeve in “Superman,” directed by Richard Donner, the film that established a prototype for modern superhero films. He also appeared in two sequels.
Eugene Allen Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California and grew up in Danville, Illinois, where his father worked as a reporter for commercial news. His parents fight repeatedly, and his father often uses his fist to elicit his rage. The boy found shelter in the cinema and identified it as a role model with screen rebels such as Errol Flynn and James Cagney.
When Gene was 13, his father said goodbye and drove. Abandonment was a permanent genetic injury. His mother became an alcoholic and was constantly at odds with her mother, who lived in a crushed family (Gene had a younger brother, Richard Hackman). At 16, he “suddenly, he left a sloppy and went outside.” Lies about his age and he enlists in the US Marines. In his early 30s, before his film career began, his mother died in a fire that began with his own cigarettes.
“Difficult families have developed many pretty good actors,” he observed ironically in a 2001 interview with The New York Times.
His brawls and resistance to authority led to him being demoted from Cor leader three times. His taste of show business came when he conquered the horrors of his microphone and became a disc jockey and news announcer at his unit’s radio station.
Hackman had registered Hackman in journalism at the University of Illinois. He dropped out six months later to study radio, which was released in New York. After working in Florida stations and his hometown of Danville, he returned to New York and studied painting in the Art Student League. Hackman switched again and entered the acting course at Pasadena Playhouse.
Back in New York, he found work as a doorman and truck driver among other jobs waiting for a break as an actor, sweating alongside fellow hopefuls such as Robert Duval and Dustin Hoffman. Summer work at Long Island theatres brought him a role from Broadway. Hackman began to attract attention from Broadway producers, receiving good notifications for plays such as “Any Wednesday” with Sandy Dennis and “Poor Richard” with Alan Bates.
During another play’s tryout in New Haven, Hackman was seen by film director Robert Rossen. Robert Rossen hired him in “Lilith,” starring Warren Beatty and Jean Seberg. He played small roles in other films, including “Hawaii,” leading the TV dramas of the early 1960s, including “Defender” and “Naked City.”
When Beatty began his job in “Bonnie and Clyde,” which he produced and starred in, he remembered Hackman and cast him as the retired brother of bank robber Clyde Barrow. New Yorker Pauline Kale called Hackman’s work “a beautifully controlled performance, the best performance in the film,” and he was nominated for an Academy Award for his actor.
Hackman almost appeared in another immortal film, “Alumni.” He was supposed to play Mrs. Robinson’s (Anne Bancroft) cuckold husband, but director Mike Nichols decided he was too young and replaced him with Murray Hamilton. Two years later, he was considered to have become Patriarch Mike Brady of one of television’s most famous roles, The Brady Bunch. Producer Sherwood Schwartz wanted Hackman to audition, but network executives thought he was too obscure. (I went to Robert Reed for that part).
Hackman’s first leading film role was born in 1970 with “I’ve never sang for my father.” Due to Hackman’s pain with his own father, he resisted connection to the role.
In his 2001 interview, he recalled: And he didn’t mean I was teaching myself not to behave myself. Despite having a central part, Hackman was nominated for an Oscar, as a supporting actor, and Douglas was nominated for lead. The following year he won an Oscar for Best Actor in “French Connection.”
For many years, Hackman worked with good and bad pictures. For a while, it seemed he was taking part in a contest with Michael Caine for the busiest Oscar winner in the world. In 2001 alone he appeared in “The Mexican”, “Heartbreaker”, “The Robber”, “The Royal Tenenbaum”, “Behind the Enemy Line”. But by 2004 he had spoken openly about his retirement and told Larry King that there were no projects lined up. His only achievement in recent years was to tell the Smithsonian Channel documentary “Iwajima’s Unknown Flag Razor.”
In 1956, Hackman married Feymarta, a bank teller whom he met at the YMCA dance in New York. They had son Christopher and two daughters, Elizabeth and Leslie, but they divorced in the mid-1980s. In 1991 he married classic pianist Betsie Arakawa.
When not in the film location, Hackman enjoyed painting, stunt flying, stock car racing and deep sea diving. He later wrote novels and lived on a farm in Sante Fe, New Mexico, on a hill watching the Colorado Rockies.
“I’ll probably watch for five minutes,” he once told Time magazine.
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