The one movie Gene Hackman wanted his mother to see: “She would have been proud and happy”
Playing tough guys of various dispositions may have been the way Gene Hackman propelled himself to stardom, but the actor always wished his mother had been able to see him display a more sensitive side of himself onscreen.
Whether it was Bonnie and Clyde‘s Buck Barrow, the megalomaniacal Lex Luthor in the Superman series, The French Connection‘s iconic Popeye Doyle, stern coach Norman Dale in Hoosiers, Mississippi Burning‘s dogged FBI agent Rupert Anderson, Unforgiven‘s ruthless Bill Daggett, or Crimson Tide’s stern submarine commander Frank Ramsey, many of Hackman’s most memorable roles cast him as a man of action.
While he also played his fair share of father figures, sensitive types, and reserved characters, his natural gravitas and authoritatively lived-in features were perfectly suited for embodying strong-willed, stern, and world-weary folks in various positions of power on either side of the legal, criminal, law enforcement, or military divide.
None of the above applies to the film he imagined his old dear would love, though, and it was a watershed moment in his career to boot. The 1970 drama I Never Sang for My Father earned Hackman the second Academy Award nomination of his career in what was his most prominent and powerful dramatic performance to date.
A successful college professor who has a difficult relationship with his father, Hackman’s Gene Garrison is constantly plagued by doubts and fears that his old man has never truly accepted him or loved him in the most typical sense of the term, despite the successful career he’s carved out for himself.
Dorothy Stickney’s matriarch insists that he move on and leave those daddy issues in the past, only for her death to serve as the catalyst for some long-overdue truths between father and son to be laid bare. It was Hackman’s mother, Anna, who encouraged him to pursue acting in the first place, telling him at ten years old when they took a trip to the movies that she wanted to see him up on that screen one day.
She did eventually, but by the time she died in 1962 as the result of an accidental fire started by an errant cigarette she’d been smoking, Hackman only had one feature credit to his name in his debut film Mad Dog Coll. Reflecting on I Never Sang for My Father, he wishes she’d been around to see it.
“I thought it was a sensitive picture about family and relationships, and I think she would have been proud and happy to see that,” he told GQ. “You’re fortunate to be able to do something in life that defines who you are, and who your parents may have wanted to be.”
He more than lived up to his mother’s predictions by becoming a legend of stage and screen, even if she sadly wasn’t there to see it happen.
