He left us Gene Hackman, one of the last giants of Hollywood cinema. He was 95 years old and was found lifeless on Wednesday 27 February 2025 in his home in Santa Fe, in New Mexico. His wife Betsy Arakawa, a 63 -year -old pianist with whom he had been married since 1991, was also found with him. Next to them the dog, in a dynamic still to be clarified but on which the County Police seems to exclude the possibility of a crime.

Hackman, who was born on January 30, 1930 in San Bernardino, California, with the name of Eugene Allen Hackman, had retired from the scenes for a couple of decades. Among the most prolific and versatile actors of his generation, he collaborated during his career with some of the major directors ever, florid partnerships that led him to obtain five candidates for the Academy Awards and two wins for the violent arm of the law and the ruthless.

Youth, training and the beginnings

Hackman spent his childhood in Illinois, until his father, a journalist for a local newspaper, decided to abandon his wife and thirteen -year -old son. When he turned sixteen, Hackman lied to his age and enlisted in the Marines. First he was stationed in China, then between Hawaii and Japan.

Returning to the United States he studied journalism for a few months at the University of Illinois, who later left to go to work in television production. At thirty he saw his mother died in a fire and at that time, 1956, he decided to start following acting courses in the renowned Pasadena Playhouse, also frequented by Dustin Hoffmann, with whom he became a close friend. Curiously they never recited together until 2003, when they both took part in the cast of La jury of Gary Fleder.

Hackman then went to New York, where he began to tread the Broadway stages and participate in films and television series in especially minor roles. The recognition, a little late, begins to arrive only in 1967, the year in which the actor takes part in Gangster Story, in original Bonnie and Clyde, by Arthur Penn. Warren Beatty, in fact, was hit by Hackman on the set of Lilith by Robert Rossen of 1964, and when he was involved to make Gangster Story he wanted to with him. Here Hackman plays Buck Barrow, Clyde’s brother, a role that earned him his first Oscar candidacy for Best Supporting Actor.

The arrival of success and recognition

These are the doors of the seventies, the decade in which Hackman will be more requested and in which he will work more. These are also the years in which he begins to demonstrate that his remarkable stature, his bearing and the decisive gaze do not lead only to rough characters, criminals or ordinary men. In this regard, in an interview with the New York Times, once he said he had the face of the “everyday miner”.

Just think that some very different films belong to this period. In 1970 he obtained his second candidacy for Gilbert Cates blood ring, while in 1971 he was the protagonist in the violent arm of William Friedkin’s law, a raw and ruthless neo-noir that completely overturns the patinated rigor of the taste of the time. In the film Hackman plays the detective Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle, an unforgettable role that he earned him his first Oscar premium. The following year he is in the cast (which includes five winners of an Academy Award: also Ernest Borgnine, Jack Albertson, Shelley Winters, Red Buttons) of The Adventure of the Poseidon of Ronald Neame, daring film between adventure and disaster movie.

In 1973 it is therefore the turn of La Conversation of Francis Ford Coppola, another neo-noir with aseptic and twilight tones in which Hackman is in the body and head of Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who falls in the psychosis of moral doubt. In the same year he discarded clear tones and atmospheres when he takes part in Frankenstein Junior, the fun and legendary Mel Brooks comedy. In 1978 he even came from the parties of commercial cinema par excellence, the “cinecomic” of Richard Donner’s Superman, in which he opposed the superhero of Christopher Reeve by dressing the diabolical guise of the arch -painting Lex Luthor.

In the 1980s he still works a lot, always ranging between Gregari and important characters. To report in 1988 there are certainly works such as Mississipi Burning – The roots of the hatred of Alan Parker, in which he reads as an FBI agent alongside Willem Dafoe and Frances McDormand, so he gets the fourth Oscar candidacy. Always of the same year there is another complete reversal when he is in partnership with Woody Allen for his other woman, in which Hackman sews the tunic of the romantic hero alongside Gena Rowlands.

The last stretch of career

During the nineties he began to slow down the frantic rhythm that will bring him, when the decision to retire from the scenes arrives, to have trod the sets of over seventy films. And the nineties are the decade of Gli Tali, from 1993 In the film Hackman is once again ‘alongside’, and for his interpretation he obtained the second Oscar winner, this time as a best protagonist.

The 2000s of Hackman even inaugurated with the title of an asteroid just discovered in his name, the 55397 Hackman, while his career little by little began to stop. There is still time, however, for one last and intense race: in 2001 he took part in five films, among which the return to the comedy stands out with a part in Wes Anderson’s Teenbaums. The last appearance as an actor dates back to 2004 in another comedy, two candidates for an armchair of Donald Petrie.

Returning for a very short period between 2016 and 2017 as a narrator for a couple of documentaries on the veterans of the Marines, Hackman has dedicated himself in the last period of his life especially to the activity of writer. He published before historical novels, together with the Marine archaeologist Daniel Lenihan, then debuted alone in 2011 with a story set in the old West. He will repeat himself in 2013, this time with a police thiller. Also in 2011, in one of his rare interviews, when a GQ journalist asked him how he would have summarized his life in a single sentence, Hackman replied: “He Tried”. ‘He tried’.