Betsy Arakawa, concert pianist married to actor Gene Hackman, dead at 65
Betsy Arakawa, a concert pianist and co-founder of a home furnishing business, was found dead Wednesday in her Santa Fe, New Mexico , home along with actor-husband Gene Hackman and their dog, according to authorities. She was 65.
Arakawa and the 95-year-old Hackman lived in a Southwestern-style ranch on Old Sunset Trail, in a gated community that looks out on the Rocky Mountains. They owned as many as three German shepherds at one time and often spent their free time watching movies.
'We like simple stories that some of the little low-budget films manage to produce,' Hackman told Empire magazine in 2009.
Denise Avila, a sheriff's office spokesperson, said there was no indication they had been shot or had any wounds.
Raised in Honolulu, Arakawa studied piano at an early age and was just 11 when she performed for 9,000 children at the Honolulu International Center Concert Hall, according to a 1971 report from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin newspaper.
According to a 1981 column in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, she attended a private prep school in Honolulu before moving to Los Angeles and studying at the University of Southern California, from which she graduated with a degree in social sciences and communication.
After college, she played with the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra, now the Hawai'i Symphony Orchestra, and gave a more private show in 1989 at a Chicago-area nursing home used for Hackman's film 'The Package.'
In Santa Fe, she helped found Pandora's in 2001. The store's website describes Pandora's as 'dealing in functional art, the art of life — what one lives in, sleeps in and wraps around one's shoulders on a chilly day.'
She and Hackman met in the mid-1980s at a gym in California, according to a 1989 story in The New York Times, and they married in 1991. Hackman would deny that their relationship broke up his first marriage, to Faye Maltese.
'By the way, I did not leave my real life wife for a younger woman. We just drifted apart,' he told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in 1985, when he was promoting the film 'Twice in a Lifetime,' in which his character is a family man who falls for another woman. ____
Associated Press writer Claire Rush contributed from Portland, Oregon, and Randy Herschaft contributed from New York.
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