Gene Hackman: Hollywood’s most unlikely icon
By the time Gene Hackman was nominated for the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Academy Award for his performance as Buck Barrow in 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, he was already in his late 30s.
The iconic star, who passed away this week at the age of 95, was a late starter in the acting business. When he began learning his trade at the Pasadena Playhouse Theatre’s acting school in California, he was a 26-year-old former Marine with a wife at home. This made him at least five years older than most other students in the class, and they even voted him ‘Least Likely to Succeed’ at movie stardom.
In truth, this is a perfect microcosm of everything that made Hackman unique as an actor and a movie star. His crumpled demeanour, balding head, and hangdog face – even as a younger man – meant he didn’t look like anyone’s idea of a matinee idol. He also found himself trying to succeed in a young man’s game, vying for roles with actors significantly more youthful, better-looking, and more charismatic than him. Most of these actors probably didn’t have a fraction of Hackman’s sheer intensity, though, nor his ability to make audiences believe in his characters and their interior lives.
This kind of star quality – the less instantly obvious kind – ensured Hackman would always be in demand once he broke out, though. When he played the renegade cop Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle in William Friedkin’s Oscar-winning classic The French Connection in 1971, the world saw the birth of a firebrand 40-year-old movie star. Once again, though, as it was when Hackman began learning to act, it took people a while to see what was right in front of them. In fact, he joked that he was “at least seventh choice” to play the role, and director Friedkin has been honest that he vehemently opposed casting Hackman. He later admitted he was wrong, naturally, but this undoubtedly increased the size of the chip on Hackman’s shoulder.
Over the next three decades, Hackman became Hollywood’s most unlikely icon. He seized upon the cache given to him by The French Connection and solidified his movie star status with 11 films in the next four years. These included action-adventure movies like The Poseidon Adventure, crime pictures like The French Connection II and Night Moves, a paranoid Coppola classic in The Conversation, and even a legendarily zany cameo in Mel Brooks’ hilarious Young Frankenstein.
The list of enduring movies Hackman lent his immense talents to over the next several decades is extensive: Superman, Mississippi Burning, Hoosiers, Unforgiven, Crimson Tide, and The Royal Tenenbaums are just a selection of highlights. He was unmistakably himself in every one of them, yet also disappeared into his characters. He was known to base all his performances around this dichotomy, perfectly mining how he was similar to the characters alongside how he differed from them. In his younger days, he would walk the streets of New York, observing the movements, speech patterns, and emotions of strangers, all the while wondering how he could apply them to his work.
A quintessential Hackman performance was powerful, arresting, and explosive, yet somehow vulnerable at the same time. Perhaps that’s because he never lost the fire in his belly that came from being overlooked and doubted so often in his early career. After all, he often told the story of working as a doorman at a hotel in Times Square not long after he left the Marines. He had been trying to make it as an actor but wound up drifting and was struggling to find a way forward – until his old drill instructor walked past and muttered, “Hackman, you’re a sorry son of a bitch”. He was so embarrassed and angry that it renewed his zeal to succeed in acting, and that feeling undoubtedly stuck with him.
Hackman retired from acting in 2004 after starring in the regrettable Welcome to Mooseport with sitcom star Ray Romano. It was an ignominious end to one of Hollywood’s greatest careers, yet somehow, his response was perfectly in keeping with his personality. He admitted that he’d begun to find acting stressful and wasn’t willing to compromise himself or his integrity to keep doing it any longer. In essence, that fire in his belly had finally extinguished, and he saw no point in hanging around. He was never the sort to phone in performances, so he quietly bowed out of stardom.
Ultimately, Hackman is a study of how true acting genius and star potential can sometimes be difficult to see at first glance. His movie stardom had an intangible quality that rewarded those who looked deeper and took the time to truly feel what he was doing. Indeed, stars often come from the most unlikely places, and Hackman is a testament to that.
In his later years, he’d probably have found it bitterly amusing how his colleagues in acting school didn’t see his potential. After all, they literally couldn’t have been more wrong. You see, the other person in class they voted ‘Least Likely to Succeed’ was Hackman’s best pal in the group – an oddball 19-year-old who would become a friend and confidante for life: Dustin Hoffman.
