Gene Hackman has died aged 95. Hackman and wife Betsy Arakawa were found dead in their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, along with their dog. The BBC reports that the police are not treating the death as “foul play”.
Born in California in 1930, Hackman undertook military service before joining the Pasadena Playhouse in California, where he met fellow student Dustin Hoffman.
Moving to New York in the early 1960s, Hackman started in off-Broadway and television roles, before moving into films.
After a 1967 Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor as Buck Barrow in Arthur Penn‘s Bonnie & Clyde, Hackman went on to become one of the dominant movie stars of the 1970s, appearing in William Friedkin‘s The French Connection (1971, for which he won a Best Actor Oscar), Cisco Pike (1971), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Francis Ford Coppola‘s The Conversation (1974), Penn’s Night Moves (1975), The French Connection II, Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980).
Hackman continued to enjoy strong work in later decades, in Mississippi Burning (1988), Clint Eastwood‘s Unforgiven (1992), Walter Hill‘s Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), Crimson Tide (1995), Get Shorty (1995) and Wes Anderson‘s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).
He retired from acting after 2004’s Welcome To Mooseport.
As with many of the great actors who came up during the 1960s and ’70s, Hackman had formidable range. He equally adept at hard-edged roles like dogged New York detective Popeye Doyle in The French Connection or lonely surveillance expert Harry Caul in The Conversation (a role Coppola originally wrote for Marlon Brando) as he was with more comedic roles like master criminal Lex Luthor in Superman or the errant patriarch in The Royal Tenenbaums.