The actor Gene Hackman called “totally different from anyone I’d ever seen in my life”
Acting is one of the few public-facing professions that doesn’t have an age limit, and it’s also one of the few where retirement is a fairly malleable term. A career can be as long or short as anyone wants it to be, with Gene Hackman deciding that 2004 was the perfect time to call it quits.
The legendary star had his reasons for deciding to step away from the industry, although it’s a shame the final credit on such an esteemed filmography will always be a widely-reviled comedy where he played second fiddle to Ray Romano. On the plus side, Welcome to Mooseport is hardly going to define Hackman’s contributions to cinema.
With two Academy Award wins from five nominations to his name and an array of credits that contains classics like The French Connection, The Conversation, Unforgiven, Superman, Mississippi Burning, The Royal Tenenbaums and many more, the veteran bowed out with his place in the history books as an all-time great well and truly secured.
It was a loss for cinephiles everywhere when Hackman signalled his intentions head into self-imposed exile, but it stands to reason he was probably inundated with offers to mount a comeback. After all, he wouldn’t have been the first or last performer to claim they were done for good before making a return to the silver screen, and it was something one of his favourite actors had done.
After appearing in Billy Wilder’s 1961 political comedy One, Two, Three, James Cagney said he was officially retired. That remained true for two decades – and he even turned down a part in The Godfather Part II in the meantime – before he was coaxed back for Miloš Forman’s period drama Ragtime.
Cagney – who was also a massive inspiration for Clint Eastwood – played one final role as the lead of 1984 made-for-TV movie Terrible Joe Moran, and then he was really done for good. Although Hackman stopped short of suggesting he would do something similar, he did explain what it was he loved so much about the ‘Golden Age’ icon.
“There was a kind of energy about him, and he was totally different from anyone I’d ever seen in my life,” he said to GQ. “Having been brought up in the Midwest, I didn’t know those New York people. I thought he was terrific. Everything he did had a life to it. He was a bad guy in most of the films, and yet there was something lovable about him, and creative.”
Being a touchstone for Eastwood and Hackman speaks volumes to how Cagney impacted cinema at large, never mind the fact Orson Welles called him “maybe the greatest actor who ever appeared in front of a camera.” The exact same can be said of the aforementioned Unforgiven duo, too, encapsulating the cyclical nature of how one generation constantly inspires the next.
