Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman dies at 95
FILE – Actor Gene Hackman, winner of Best Supporting Actor at academy awards in March 1993. Hackman will turn 80 years on Jan. 30, 2010. (AP Photo, File)
LOS ANGELES – Gene Hackman, a two-time Oscar-winning actor whose career spanned five decades, has died, and authorities in New Mexico are expected to release more details about his death Thursday. He was 95.
He and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, were found dead inside their home in New Mexico on Wednesday afternoon.
The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department says the couple was found during a welfare check following a call from a neighbor concerned about their well-being, Public Information Officer Denise Avila told ABC News.
Hackman was born on Jan. 30, 1930, in San Bernardino and grew up in Danville, Illinois, where his father worked as a pressman for a local newspaper and his mother was a waitress.
Hackman’s parents divorced when he was 13.
He lied about his age and enlisted in the US Marines when he was 16, at the end of World War II. He served four years in the military as a radio operator and moved to New York after he was discharged. He went to college briefly after his military service, studying to become a journalist, but dropped out after six months.
He worked in TV production in New York before moving to Pasadena to study acting. While taking classes at the Pasadena Playhouse, he met Dustin Hoffman, who was known as Dusty at the time.
Hackman moved back to New York, and Hoffman followed him shortly thereafter, and shared an apartment with another young actor, Robert Duvall.
Hackman had roles in some of the most popular and respected movies in Hollywood history. He played Lex Luthor in “Superman” in 1978, a high school basketball coach in “Hoosiers” in 1986, and the conservative senator opposite Robin Williams in “The Birdcage” in 1996.
His most celebrated roles came as playing law enforcement figures in “The French Connection” and “Unforgiven.” He won his first Academy Award for his role as New York City police Detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in 1971’s “The French Connection,” and his second 20 years later playing corrupt Sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett in director Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, “Unforgiven.”
Hackman had other memorable roles throughout his acting career, including a conflicted surveillance expert in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 suspense thriller “The Conversation”; an FBI agent who pushes ethical boundaries while investigating the murders of three civil rights workers in the 1988 drama “Mississippi Burning”; and Capt. Frank Ramsey, the rigid nuclear submarine commander in 1995’s “Crimson Tide,” opposite Denzel Washington.
“You go through stages in your career that you feel very good about yourself. Then you feel awful, like, ‘Why didn’t I choose something else?’ ”Hackman told GQ magazine in 2011, seven years after his retirement from acting.
“But overall I’m pretty satisfied that I made the right choice when I decided to be an actor. I was lucky to find a few things that I could do well as an actor and that I could look at and say, ‘Yeah, that’s all right.’ ”
After appearing in nearly 80 films over 40 years, Hackman’s final role was in the 2004 political satire “Welcome to Mooseport.”
He received five Academy Award nominations as well as two BAFTA Awards out of five career nominations. Hackman was nominated for eight Golden Globe awards and won three, in addition to being presented with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2003 for his “outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment.”
Hackman was married twice, the first time for 30 years to Faye Maltese, with whom he had three children. They divorced in 1986. He married Arakawa, a classical pianist 30 years his junior, in 1991. He is survived by his son and two daughters. (CNS)
