Gene Hackman, one of the great American actors of the 20th century, dies at 95

BarcelonaGene Hackman, the actor of French connection either Unforgiven, one of the great actors of American cinema, was found dead this Thursday in his house in Santa Fe County, New Mexico, where the police found him next to the body of his wife, the classical pianist Betsy Arakawa, and the couple's dog. The investigation is still open, but through a statement the police have made it known that they do not believe that the deaths of Hackman and Arakawa were violent. The couple had been married for more than three decades and the actor, 95 years old, had been retired from acting for some time and had not given interviews.

With his appearance of an ordinary man and without affectation, Hackman arrived in the cinema during the 60s, just when American directors were opening up to realism and the new European currents. In him, American cinema found a versatile and credible actor, capable of revising the archetype of the tough man configured during the golden age of Hollywood by Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney, but also of showing his fragility as a vulnerable man. Hackman was born in 1930 in San Bernardino, California, and after his parents' divorce left him with a scar on his face, he joined the army at the age of 16, where he served for three years. He had a late interest in acting, and began his acting studies in 1956, and in the early 1960s he landed his first roles in films, series and theatre.

The Graduate (1967), which he was supposed to star in, could have changed the actor's life, but director Mike Nichols fired him after a few weeks of filming and replaced him with a young Dustin Hoffman, a good friend of Hackman. However, Warren Beatty, with whom he had coincided in Lilith (1964), called him to play his brother in Bonnie & Clide, the other big cinema hit of 1967. Bonnie & Clide It earned him his first Oscar nomination and definitively opened the doors to the cinema.

The French Connection

In 1970 he was nominated for an Oscar again for the father-son drama I never sang for my father, and the following year he won the Oscar for best actor for his role as police detective Jimmy Doyle in French connection, the fast-paced thriller in which William Friedkin dynamited the narrative conventions of American cinema, the almost documentary style of the French New Wave to film Doyle's relentless pursuit of the perfidious drug dealer played by Fernando Rey. Hackman's Doyle (or Popeye, as everyone calls him) is a bad-tempered policeman, a stickler for rules and a womanizer, a cousin of another icon of police cinema of the time, Clint Eastwood's Harry the Brut, but toned down with a touch of roguish charm and black humor that he also gives it. French connection 2 (1975).

The first half of the 70s is surely the most splendid phase of the actor's career, with roles full of complexity such as that of the surveillance expert thriller psychological The conversation (1974) by Francis Ford Coppola, charismatic heroes like the protagonist of The adventure of Poseidon (1972) and full of humanity like that of The scarecrow (1973), Hackman's favorite role, where he and Al Pacino are two vagabonds in a great story of friendship and broken dreams. Although he is showered with offers to play characters such as the private detective of the thriller by Arthur Penn The night moves (1975), Hackman resists typecasting and demonstrates his comic versatility in a small role in Young Frankenstein (1974) or playing the criminal genius Lex Luthor in Superman (1978), a character that he approaches with a parodic sense of humor that was accentuated in the sequels of 1980 and 1987.

The 80s were years of much work for Hackman, who alternated leading roles (Eureka, Beyond Value either Double agent in Berlin, with a young Matt Dillon) with meritorious supporting actors in Reds (1981) by Warren Beatty or Power (1986) by Sidney Lumet. Two of his most popular films are from this period: More than idols, the sports drama about a rural American school team that wins the state championship; Hackman plays the seasoned, headstrong coach who determinedly leads the team to victory. More interesting and subtle is his FBI agent character in Mississippi Cream (1988), a stifling drama about the investigation of racist crimes in which Hackman, who was nominated for an Oscar, acts as a realistic and cautious counterpoint to the rigidity of the idealistic agent played by Willem Dafoe.

A team player

Rather than claiming the spotlight on his individual work, Hackman's genius is to understand acting as a collective work, establishing very interesting dynamics with his fellow cast members. An example of this is his role as the commander of a nuclear submarine in the thriller military Red tide (1995), which contains a magnificent acting duel with a young Denzel Washington, but also his magnificent role as Tom Cruise's mentor in the corrupt law firm of The signature (1993). Hackman always put himself at the service of history and made the films and his fellow actors better.

Clint Eastwood knew this too, and he called him to play one of the key roles in Unforgiven (1992). Hackman rejected him out of hand because he was fed up with violent characters, but Eastwood explained that he did not want to glorify the violence of the western, but to strip it of glamour and show all its horror. Hackman ended up taking on the role of Sheriff Little Bill, which earned him the second Oscar of his career. With the success of Unforgiven, the genre was revived for a few years and Hackman linked three westerns followed: Geronimo, the legend (1993), Wyatt Earp (1994) and Quick deadly (1995), always in supporting roles.

Consecrated as one of the great American actors of his generation, the final stretch of Hackman's career was spent between the lightness of likeable comedies like The pot of crickets (1996), directed by Mike Nichols himself who had fired him fromThe Graduate decades earlier, and the proven effectiveness of thrillers competent as Public enemy (1998), Behind enemy lines (2001), The last time (2001) or Under suspicion (2000), but there was also room for more ambitious titles such as Absolute power (1997), Clint Eastwood's suspense drama in which the director plays a white-collar thief who is an involuntary witness to the violent crime committed with impunity by a hypocritical and corrupt US president Gene Hackman. One of the great roles of these years is that of the patriarch of an eccentric and dysfunctional family in The Tenembaums (2001), the last masterpiece of the actor's filmography, which Wes Anderson wrote with Hackman in mind and which the actor reluctantly accepted only at the insistence of his agent.

The comedy Welcome to Mooseport, from 2004, was his discreet farewell to cinema: despite offers from Hollywood, he distanced himself from the industry and the media and dedicated himself to writing historical novels with the archaeologist Daniel Lenihan or, already alone, the western Payback at Morning Peak (2011) or the thriller police Pursuit (2013). The appearance of some photographs of the actor a couple of years ago, looking visibly older, caused a somewhat absurd uproar, as if Hollywood stars had no right to grow older. The actor never broke his silence and remained aloof from the noise. Consistent until the last moment, he lived apart from the opinions of others and everything points to the fact that this was also how he died.