Police consider the death of actor Gene Hackman and his wife "suspicious"

BarcelonaGene Hackman, actor of French connection and Unforgiven, one of the great interpreters 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, a German shepherd. The investigation of the deaths is still open and the cause of death has not been made public.

Death under suspicion

Initially, the Santa Fe police reported that there was no evidence, believing that the deaths of Hackman and Arakawa were violent, but hours later, according to reports Variety, a search warrant has been requested on the grounds that "the deaths are suspicious enough to require further investigation." Alerted by a neighbor, the authorities found the couple in different rooms, with no evidence of a gas leak, and next to Arakawa's body, which showed "obvious signs of decomposition, swelling on the face and mummification of the hands and feet," there was an open bottle of pills and the contents scattered. Hackman's body showed "obvious signs of death, similar and consistent with those of Arakawa." In addition to the dead dog, there were two other dogs in the house, in good health. The couple had been married for more than three decades and the actor, 95 years old, had long retired from acting and had not given interviews.

With his ordinary, unassuming appearance, Hackman arrived in the cinema during the sixties, just when American directors were opening up to realism and new European currents. American cinema found in him a versatile and credible actor, capable of revising the archetype of the tough man configured during the golden age of Hollywood by Humphrey Bogart and 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, which left its mark on him, he joined the army at the age of 16, where he served for three years. With a late vocation for acting, he began his acting studies in 1956 and in the early sixties he received his first roles in films, series and theatres.

The Graduate (1967), which he was supposed to star in, could have changed his 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. Warren Beatty, with whom he had coincided in Lilith (1964), called him to play his brother in Bonnie & Clyde, the other big cinema hit of 1967. Bonnie & Clyde It earned him his first Oscar nomination and definitively opened the doors to the cinema.

The French Connection

In 1970, the academics nominated him 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 The 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. The French connection 2 (1975).

The first half of the seventies 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 others filled to the brim with humanity like the one in 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) and playing the criminal mastermind 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 eighties were years of much work for Hackman, who alternated leading roles (Eureka, Beyond Value and Double agent in Berlin, with a young Matt Dillon) with meritorious supporting actors in Reds (1981) by Warren Beatty and Power (1986) by Sidney Lumet. Two of his most popular films are from that period. One is More than idols (1986), the sports drama about a rural American school team that wins the state championship: Hackman plays the seasoned and stubborn coach who determinedly leads the team to victory. More interesting and subtle is his role as an FBI agent in Mississippi Cream (1988), a suffocating 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 task, 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 great acting duel with a young Denzel Washington, but also his magnificent role as Tom Cruise's mentor in the corrupt law firm of The firm (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 Fast and deadly (1995), always in supporting roles.

Established as one of the great American actors of his generation, the final stretch of Hackman's career was spent in the lightness of likeable comedies such as 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) and 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 actor's latest masterpiece, 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 the 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) and 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 did not break his silence and remained out of the noise.