Gene Hackman, Oscar-winning star of ‘Hoosiers’ and ‘Unforgiven,’ dies at 95
Gene Hackman, the prolific and versatile two-time Oscar-winning actor whose career spanned five decades, has died at 95.
He and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, were found dead in their home Wednesday afternoon, the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office said. Universally lauded for his acting skill, Hackman’s everyman quality enabled him to embody a broad range of characters in multiple genres — from the preening, comical villain Lex Luthor opposite Christopher Reeve in 1978’s “Superman,” to a disgraced high school basketball coach looking for redemption in the 1986 drama “Hoosiers,” to an ultra-conservative senator forced to dress in drag to escape the paparazzi in the 1996 Robin Williams comedy “The Birdcage.”
Yet Hackman particularly excelled in roles that featured him playing flawed authority figures, performances lent extra gravitas by his craggy features, which could morph from pathos to bemusement to menace with a twitch, and his and physically imposing six-feet, two-inch frame. He won his first Academy Award for his role as the dogged New York City police Detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in 1971’s “The French Connection,” and his second twenty years later playing corrupt Sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett in director Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, “Unforgiven.”
Other standout roles include a conflicted surveillance expert in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 suspense thriller “The Conversation”; a hardened FBI agent who pushes ethical boundaries while investigating the murders of three civil rights workers in the 1988 drama “Mississippi Burning”; and Captain Frank Ramsey, the rigid nuclear submarine commander in 1995’s “Crimson Tide,” opposite Denzel Washington.
Hackman spent his retirement writing novels, including a Western, a police thriller and three works of historical fiction. He made few public appearances, preferring instead to spend time at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife, Betsy Arakawa. In 2008, he popped up in an episode of the Food Network show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” as a regular customer of a Santa Fe restaurant featured on the program.
Asked by GQ in that same 2011 interview how he’d like to be remembered, Hackman’s response was simple.
“As a decent actor,” he said. “As someone who tried to portray what was given to them in an honest fashion. I don’t know, beyond that. I don’t think about that often, to be honest. I’m at an age where I should think about it.”
Hackman was married twice, the first time for 30 years to Faye Maltese, with whom he had three children and whom he divorced in 1986. He married Arakawa, a classical pianist 30 years his junior, in 1991.
ABC News’ Carson Blackwelder contributed to this report.
