Academy Award-Winning Actor Gene Hackman Dies at 95

His mother, a waitress, later died in a house fire, drinking and passing out with a lighted cigarette, he told GQ. She had once taken him to the movies, and told him she hoped “to see you do that someday.” But “unfortunately, my mom never saw me act, so I’m sorry for that, but that’s the way it is.”

At 16, after a troubled youth and a night in jail for stealing soda and candy, he joined the Marines, serving in Japan and in China during Mao’s revolution before being discharged in 1952. (“I was not a good Marine. I made corporal once, and was promptly busted," he told Larry King.)

He returned home to study journalism at the University of Illinois, but dropped out six months later, feeling the tug of a different career.

Rankling against authority and inspired by tough guy James Cagney, he followed his childhood dream of becoming an actor, and moved to New York. There he found employment in television production, and bounced around the country from station to station before returning to New York to study theater. 

That trail led him to California, where he enrolled in the Pasadena Playhouse and met another off-tilt actor named Dustin Hoffman, with whom he would later star in the film Runaway Jury (2003). They were instant friends, seeing the unorthodox in each other, and went up on the Playhouse roof together to play bongos.

A year into the Playhouse program, however, Hackman got thrown out for poor grades. He’d never quite fit, he thought, being 6-feet-2 and a “big lummox kind of person,” as he described himself to Britain’s The Independent newspaper. The rejection stung, and he went back to New York to study at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio.

There, Hoffman became his roommate, but they disagreed on housekeeping habits: “He was the worst. We had to hose the rooms down and sweep them out,” Hackman said in a BBC interview. 

After bit parts in TV and appearing in the comedy stage show Any Wednesday, Hackman made his film debut in Lilith (1964), starring Warren Beatty, who remembered him when it came time to cast the role of the brother in Bonnie and Clyde. His Oscar nomination for the role quickly propelled him, and directors took note of what Hackman called “your everyday mine worker” face, as he told The Independent, one that always seemed middle-aged, yet capable of expressing great emotion and torment.

The French Connection made him a star and secured his first Academy Award. But after taking too many questionable roles in lesser films, blowing money on cars and planes and running afoul of the tax laws, he found himself in trouble, saying in Cigar Aficionado that he had to use his daughter’s “piece-of-s***” car” to get to job interviews.

In 1977, he retired, only to come back and then retire for good in 2004 after a role in the satire Welcome to Mooseport.  Acting, he said, was too stressful, particularly after he underwent angioplasty in 1990 for congestive heart failure.

He opted for a quieter life in Santa Fe, New Mexico, bicycling, and spending time with his second wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa, whom he married in 1991. From 1999 to 2008, he cowrote three historical novels with his neighbor, the underwater archaeologist Daniel Lenihan.

“We realized that we both loved Hemingway and Melville,” Hackman told AARP in 2011. “I said, ‘Let's write a novel together.’ ”

Two solo novels, the Western Payback at Morning Peak (2011); and a police thriller, Pursuit (2013), followed. In 2016, he narrated a documentary, The Unknown Flag Raiser of Iowa Jima, and in 2017 narrated We, the Marines.

In the 2011 GQ interview, he was asked how he wanted to be remembered.

“As a decent actor,” he replied. “As someone who tried to portray what was given to them in an honest fashion. I don't know, beyond that. I don't think about that often, to be honest. I'm at an age where I should think about it.”

Hackman is survived by his three children, Christopher Allen Hackman, Elizabeth Jean Hackman, and Leslie Anne Hackman, from his first wife, Faye Maltese.

Editor’s Note: The story has been updated to include the cause of death.