Gene Hackman (1930-2025): The Discreet Hero

IN A WORLD where everyone chased the spotlight, Gene Hackman preferred the quiet spaces. He’d been a US Marine, a doorman, a leather furniture polisher, before finally doing what he wanted to do—act. “I never had the aspirations to be a star. I wanted to be an actor. A movie actor, a theatre actor, that’s all I ever wanted to do,” he once said in a rare interview, and that in many ways was what made Hackman, a two-time Oscar winner, stand out.

When he retired, he never once turned to seek the limelight again, a rare quality in Hollywood where comebacks were directly proportionate to the size of the paycheque. Hackman was that classic ‘American Everyman’, sometimes a villain, sometimes a hero. He could be Lex Luthor, Su­perman’s antagonist (1978), or Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle, the narcotics officer in The French Connection (1971); he could be the mean-spirited sheriff, William ‘Little Bill’ Daggett, in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), or a mor­ally tainted lawyer in The Firm (1993).

He was always in search of characters, of different lives lived, of adventures embarked upon. In a sense, when he left home at 16 to join the Marines, his explo­ration began, and also his understanding of the world as well as his place in it. He may have been part of a uni­verse of illusions, but he was never deluded. As he said once: “When you’re on top, you get a sense of immortal­ity. You feel you can do no wrong, that it will always be good no matter what the role. Well, in truth, that feeling is death. You must be honest with yourself.”

There was something tragic about his persona—a sense of gruff sadness he always carried within him, and perhaps his passing on in New Mexico, at 95, with his wife and dog accom­panying him on his last journey, was also meant to be. As is common, Holly­wood may well be kinder to him in death than it was to him in life.

And should they do that, he has left them an enor­mous body of work to study, “Villains are always the best roles,” Hackman told the Washington Post in 1996. “It’s the best kind of acting. The things you get to do.” And indeed, it’s not always that you can tell Superman to take a chill pill with a charm­ing snarl, or tell Eastwood that you’ll see him in hell, or stand amid the wreckage of your life having spent much of your career as a surveillance expert in The Conversation (1974).

But Hackman wasn’t a vanilla villain. He was a man who wrestled with his conscience, who was mor­ally ambivalent, who em­bodied the troubled times, who even if he won, some­times did it at a personal cost. He could be a seasoned commanding officer of a US nuclear missile submarine clashing with his junior and the Russians in Crimson Tide (1995) or a money-hungry jury consultant in Runaway Jury (2003). With a slight flicker, a grimace, or even a chilly smile, Hackman conveyed a lot by doing little.

Working for six decades, he entertained and engaged audiences, and once he left Hollywood, he kept it that way. Hackman existed so that viewers could see a bit of themselves up there on the big screen, wrestling with guilt or wracked with doubt, but always alive and involved.

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