Actor Gene Hackman was found dead Wednesday alongside his wife Betsy Arakawa and their dog inside the family’s New Mexico home.WARNER BROS/Warner Bros.
If you have ever been to the movies over the past half-century, then you have had a Gene Hackman moment. That flicker when the actor switches on a light that had previously not been shone – the second that a movie comes fully alive.
Maybe it is when his unfaithful and irascible patriarch Royal Tenenbaum confronts his estranged ex-wife with the tragic news that he is dying, the actor pivoting from heartbreaking pity to grin-stretching rascal and back again in the span of two quick minutes alongside a beguiled Anjelica Huston. Perhaps it is Hackman as the scowling cop Popeye Doyle, driving like hell under Brooklyn’s elevated B train to catch his fugitive prey. Your memory might even stretch all the way back to Hackman’s breakthrough performance – not many actors get one at the ripe age of 37, making it all the more impressive – as Buck Barrow, the doomed older brother of Warren Beatty’s bank-robbing anti-hero Clyde.
There is no wrong answer, really, because there is no wrong Hackman moment. Every one of his films was unforgettable because every one of the actor’s performances demanded to be burned into your memory.
And yet, upon hearing the awful news that the actor had been found dead Wednesday alongside his wife Betsy Arakawa and their dog inside the family’s New Mexico home – no foul play is suspected, but as of press time, a cause of death has not been determined – I could not help but flash to one of Hackman’s greatest, if perhaps less culturally canonized, roles.
In David Anspaugh’s 1986 drama Hoosiers – a movie that might not have invented the underdog sports genre, but certainly cemented the most beautiful elements of the formula – Hackman plays basketball coach Norman Dale as a man perpetually trying to outrun his shadow. Hackman is asked to play someone who knows that greatness lies within us all, but cannot reconcile his own potential with the doubts, fears and nerves that rattle even the most confident hero. And so, during a do-or-die moment, Hackman delivers one barnburner of a speech about the cost and rewards of self-belief that seems to double as a mini-manifesto as to how the actor appeared to approach his own stagecraft.
“There’s a tradition in a tournament to not talk about the next step until you’ve climbed the one in front of you,” Hackman says, his eyes on the young players in front of him, but his actual gaze somehow also set inward, reflective. “Forget about the crowds. Remember what got you here. Focus on the fundamentals. If you put effort and concentration into playing to your potential … in my book, we’re going to be winners.”
Hackman and Tom Cruise in scene from The Firm.Paramount Pictures
The speech itself is sturdy enough in its construction. Yet the firm inflection that Hackman gives to each word, his confident bark, the way he keeps his feet glued to the ground, and that deep, penetrable stare – the actor sells the dialogue, the scene, the character, the entire world. And he does it all by focusing on the job at hand, forgetting about what others see and only working on what he can deliver as a performer. The effort, the concentration, the fundamentals.
Like his New Hollywood contemporaries Robert Duvall and Dustin Hoffman, who crashed American cinema at a time of easy riders and raging bulls, Hackman represented something bold, fierce and destabilizing for the industry. He was a star with the bright fire of a leading man and the scrappy features of a character actor, the power of his presence rooted in a blue-collar life lived far away from the dynasties of showbiz. By the time that Hackman began to professionally pursue acting, he had already served in the Marines and worked as a radio operator. He knew the real world, and the daily grind and small victories that it could bring.
But underneath Hackman’s veneer of grit was a heart-bursting sensitivity. You could sense it in every role, no matter how prickly and hard-edged. In Crimson Tide, the actor laced a suffocating sense of duty underneath the hardass discipline of his submarine commander. His sadistic sheriff in Unforgiven was the perfect villain because Hackman knew just the right emotional levers to pull when asked to face off against Clint Eastwood’s twinkly-eyed outlaw. You even rooted for his devilish corporate lawyer in The Firm – if someone had to outsmart Tom Cruise’s naive do-gooder, why shouldn’t it be the ferociously malicious Hackman?
Hackman was a great jester, too. In the actor’s hands, Lex Luthor was a sympathetic fool, almost the rightfully aggrieved victim of the world’s many cocky supermen rather than their evil tormentor. He knew just how to let Robin Williams and Nathan Lane’s off-the-wall energy bounce against his absurdly conservative armour in The Birdcage. And then there is his hoot-and-a-half turn as Harold the Blind Man, scourge of monsters everywhere, up to and including the titular Young Frankenstein.
Hackman, seen above in a scene from The Royal Tenenbaums, was a star with the bright fire of a leading man and the scrappy features of a character actor, the power of his presence rooted in a blue-collar life lived far away from the dynasties of showbiz.Touchstone Picutres
The actor’s sheer, remarkably controlled power didn’t exactly come free, though. Hackman was an infamously eager-to-spar talent, squaring off over the years with Wes Anderson (“Pull up your pants and act like a man!” the actor reportedly barked at his director on-set, requiring the intervention of Bill Murray) and Barry Sonnenfeld (the Get Shorty director has recalled being on the receiving end of a tirade while at the film’s premiere). Some filmmakers, though, were able to stand their ground and then some, constantly coming back for more, including Eastwood (Unforgiven, Absolute Power), Tony Scott (Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State), Mike Nichols (Postcards from the Edge, The Birdcage) and three-timer Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, Night Moves, Target). His juice was worth the squeeze.
In 2004, the era of Gene Hackman was curiously capped with the soft political comedy Welcome to Mooseport – the film that would mark his last onscreen performance. Few other than co-star Ray Romano’s immediate family might fondly recall the film, but Hackman wasn’t taking an easy paycheque gig. Watch the scene in which his character, a former U.S. president running for mayor of a small town – the second POTUS that Hackman played, after Absolute Power – faces off in a game of golf against Romano’s seemingly harmless political rival. As the former leader of the free world is upstaged on the green by a political naïf, Hackman lets his frustrations bubble, simmer, but never pop.
There is a fire in there, just as ever. Hackman knew exactly what he was doing – the fundamentals – even as he decided he would rather not do it any longer. Forget about the crowds. Gene Hackman was always the winner.
