Gene Hackman: The brawling genius of film

at the age of 42 – and made him a star.

, had a remarkable career, spanning 85 movies and acclaimed roles in television and on stage. Yet success came only after numerous crushing disappointments. Many aspiring actors would have given up, but tough former marine Hackman said he held on to his conviction that “I wasn’t going to let any f***ers get me down”.

The actor, born Eugene Alden Hackman in San Bernardino, California, in 1930, learnt resilience at just 13, when his father walked out on the family for good. “He always went too far, laid it on pretty heavy,” recalled Hackman of his dad, who operated a newspaper printing press and believed in corporal punishment. Things came to a head in 1943, after the family had been forced to relocate to Danville, Illinois, and live with Hackman’s maternal grandmother.

46 years later. He drew on the emotions of that fateful day in his career, quipping that “dysfunctional families have sired a number of pretty good actors”.

As a teenager, part of a single-parent family that moved about a lot, Hackman was frequently in trouble. He rowed with authority figures at Storm Lake High School in Iowa. He even spent a night in jail after stealing candy and a bottle of soda. His most peaceful times were when his movie-loving mother Anna took him to the cinema to watch his beloved James Cagney, a hobby that sowed the seeds of his future ambitions.

Hackman finally left school after a furious row with his basketball coach. After working for a brief spell in a steel mill, he lied about his age so he could join the Marine Corps at 16, “looking for adventure”. He spent four and a half years in the marines – serving in Japan and undergoing missions in China during Mao’s revolutionary years. His proclivity for mischief was not cured by wearing military uniform, however, and he was reprimanded for brawling. “I have trouble with direction, because I just have always had trouble with authority,” he told Larry King in 2004. “I was not a good marine. I made corporal once and was promptly busted.”

Fate intervened just as his battalion was called up to fight in the Korean war. Hackman crashed a motorcycle into a tractor that had no lights, breaking his right leg, right shoulder and left knee, which left him unfit for active service. After being discharged in 1952, Hackman spent six months studying journalism at the University of Illinois before dropping out. At the age of 22, he made his way to New York to try to be an actor, bolstered by the taste of show business he had sampled as a marine, when he had been a disc jockey and news announcer on Armed Forces Radio Service.

Hackman would later ruefully recall the dark days of his early twenties, scuffling around miserable jobs and living at the YMCA in New York. He drove trucks, worked as a shop assistant at a drugstore (“customers treated you like crapola”), sold confectionery door to door, worked in an upmarket women’s shoe department (where he would slip expensive shoes to friends in exchange for a few dollars) and hauled furniture up to highrise apartments. The worst job, he said, was the night work at the Chrysler Building, polishing leather furniture.

What Hackman described as the “turning point” of his life came in 1955 when he was a doorman at a Times Square hotel. A marine sergeant who had been his drill instructor happened to walk past, dressed in full colours. “He never looked at me but muttered, ‘Hackman, you’re a sorry son of a bitch’,” he told David Letterman. Hackman was “so embarrassed” by the way he was earning a living that he redoubled his efforts to make it as an actor.

Things began to change in 1956. On New Year’s Day, he married his girlfriend Faye Maltese, a bank secretary, and she encouraged him to pursue his dreams. They moved back to California, where Hackman enrolled at the Pasadena Playhouse theatre’s acting school. “I was not considered one of their most promising students,” Hackman recalled drolly in a 1987 interview. He was putting it mildly.

At 26, he was more than five years older than most of his fellow students, whom he regarded as tanned young “walking surfboards”. Hackman, who was 6ft 2in, thought of himself as “big lummox kind of person”, talking self-deprecatingly about having the face of “your everyday mineworker”. His classmates did not rate him. The only person he liked was a small, 19-year-old oddball who strolled around in a suede vest and sandals and was also unpopular with the rest of the class, who called him a “beatnik”. That friend was Dustin Hoffman.

The future Oscar winners bonded over their dislike of their fellow students. “Dustin was thought of as amusing and strange,” Hackman recalled in 1998. “I’d been in the Marine Corps for five years and was married – an equally unlikely candidate for movie stardom.” Hackman and Hoffman would escape their classmates by going up onto the roof of the theatre to play bongos.

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in 2013. “He would have a part, and then go back to moving furniture.” Hackman did, however, take on board two fundamental questions Morrison said he should dwell on for every part: “How am I like this person?” and “How am I not like this person?”

The battle to get onto Broadway was arduous – “No one starts at the top in the theatre,” he said, “and the bottom is a very ugly place” – but he gradually began to get promising parts, making decent money for the first time. His biggest disappointment was that his mother, who died in 1962 when her burning cigarette ignited a fire in her home, was not around to see him fulfil his dreams. Even as an old man, Hackman would talk wistfully about a trip to the cinema with her, when she had said she hoped “to see you do that someday”.

’s George Kennedy.

(1975).

in 2001. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I can use this.’ I just took that disappointment and did this kind of transference.” He won an Oscar for his performance.

that “he had to get in a fight. He’d go to some bar.”

. “Then the other guy jumped on me. We had this ugly wrestling match on the ground. The police came … I got a couple of good shots in. The guy had me around the neck. That’s the ugly part. When you’re down on the ground and you’re nearly 72 years old.”

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The paradoxes of his life are plentiful. His political views were liberal; he was a lifelong Democrat voter who was proud of being listed as an “enemy” of President Nixon. Yet Hackman was also fond of arch-conservative Ronald Reagan, saying: “I loved the idea of that man. He was so committed to a beautiful America.”

He was as happy talking about his beloved Jacksonville Jaguars football team as he was about art. Hackman started painting impressionist oil works in the 1950s, shortly after taking a class at the Art Students League of New York. At the height of his fame, the Oscar winner steered clear of “shallow” Hollywood parties, preferring instead to spend his spare time stunt-flying and deep-sea diving. In the late 1970s, Hackman drove in Sports Car Club of America races and even competed in a 24-hour sports car endurance test in a Toyota he shared with leading Japanese racer Masanori Sekiya.

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(2001).

(1973), which Hackman described as his favourite movie he had worked on, he and Al Pacino play a pair of ex-con hobos who dream of opening a car wash. “It’s the only film I’ve ever made in absolute continuity, and that allowed me to take all kinds of chances and really build my character,” he said.

by staying in costume and character while they spent time on the streets of San Francisco. Hackman told Letterman about asking a muttering homeless man on Market Street the way to the nearest soup kitchen. The man gave them comprehensive directions. After they thanked him, in gruff voices, the homeless man smiled back and replied, “You’re welcome, Mr Hackman and Mr Pacino.”

(1974). Finding out that he had been second choice to Marlon Brando seemed to inspire him to even greater heights. The prescient script about illegal wire-tapping, written by director Francis Ford Coppola several years before Nixon’s Watergate scandal, reveals Hackman’s brilliance as a character actor, playing such a secretive, introverted man. “That was the pinnacle of my acting career in terms of character development,” Hackman said. “Caul was somewhat constipated. The character didn’t burst out. There was no satisfying cathartic moment in the film.”

(1977). In the late 1970s and 80s, Hackman also ran into problems with tax liabilities, joking that he had to borrow his daughter’s “piece-of-s***” car to get to interviews in Hollywood, having blown money on expensive motor vehicles, private planes and bad investments. “I was just barely hanging in, taking pretty much anything that was offered to me and trying to make it work,” he told interviewer Alysse Minkoff in 2000.

He had also been left devastated when his best friend Norman Garey shot himself in 1982. Four years later, his troubled marriage to Faye, with whom he’d had three children, ended in divorce. It was a terrible time for Hackman, who admitted he was struggling to find the motivation to act.

after such a troubled period. “He is incapable of bad work,” said the film’s director, Alan Parker. “Every director has a short list of actors he’d die to work with, and I’ll bet Gene’s on every one.”

, a 19th-century sea adventure no less. They went on to write four more books, including a western thriller. Hackman said the hardest thing about writing fiction is the constant editing. “I like the loneliness of writing, actually. It’s similar in some ways to acting, but it’s more private and I feel like I have more control over what I’m trying to say and do.”

, a satire in which he played retired president Monroe “Eagle” Cole. As an older man, he found the acting business “very stressful” and was no longer willing to make “the compromises that you have to make in films”. He later joked that he would only take another movie role if it was filmed in his house.

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in 2001.

After retiring, Hackman was amused rather than angry when – unlike the homeless man in San Francisco in 1973 – a film crew in his home town failed to recognise him. “There was a young assistant director on a backstreet in Santa Fe, directing traffic,” he said in 2011. “I pulled up next to her and asked her if they were hiring any extras. She said, ‘No, I’m very sorry, sir.’”

Hackman once said that he wanted to be remembered as “a decent actor – as someone who tried to portray what was given to them in an honest fashion”. He did so much more than that. Hackman was simply one of the greatest actors of our age – even if he did become “least likely to succeed as an elderly extra”.

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