Gene Hackman's Gritty, Grouchy, Old-School Style

New York Times

28-02-2025

In the decades separating the suave Cary Grant from the willowy Timothée Chalamet, there was a leading man with a rougher kind of charm.
Even in his box-office heyday, Gene Hackman had a receding hairline and a paunch. He could pass for 50 when he was 30. He described himself as a 'big lummox kind of person.'
His first noteworthy role came alongside Jean Seberg in the 1964 film 'Lillith.' Ms. Seberg said she found Mr. Hackman handsome because his face had so much character to it — but she didn't believe he would go very far in an industry that favored Warren Beatty and other more conventionally attractive men.
But changing attitudes demanded a new kind of star, and Mr. Hackman arrived when the sharp-focus cinema of the midcentury years gave way to the grainier palette of the 1970s, a time when the line between hero and antihero was blurring.
He was 40 when he had his first leading role, in the drama 'I Never Sang for My Father.' The next year he put on a porkpie hat to play the vicious cop Popeye Doyle in 'The French Connection,' a performance that won him the first of his two Oscars.
In keeping with his Midwestern upbringing, he was modest and polite, but he was not always able to keep his anger in check. He had a habit of arguing with film executives, producers and directors — anyone in a position of authority.
News of his death came during a week when the nicely coifed movie stars of the social media age were glad-handing their way through the final rounds of an expensive and elaborate Academy Awards campaign. Suddenly, the irascibility at the heart of Mr. Hackman's work and persona seemed like a relic of the days when actors were not so eager to smile on cue, not so willing to play the game.
He had a leading role in 'The Poseidon Adventure,' one of the biggest blockbusters of the 1970s, but he tended to disparage the film in interviews, and he turned down a chance to take part in a planned sequel, even when he was offered a nice payday.
He recounted the story of his refusal on a 1974 episode of 'The Tonight Show.' Seated next to Johnny Carson, who took drags now and then from a cigarette, Mr. Hackman was the very model of the '70s-style leading man, with his unkempt sideburns, thinning hair, thick mustache, wide-lapel blazer and undone brown collared shirt as he made fun of the movie-industry executives and their crackpot plan. 'They called me,' he said, 'and I said, 'Well, yeah, but I got killed in the last five minutes of the film.' 'Well, we'll get around it.' I said, 'I don't think so.''
While making 'The Package,' a forgettable 1980s thriller, he angrily delayed a nighttime shoot on the streets of Chicago because of what he perceived as a flaw in the script. His character, an expert marksman, was called upon to fire his weapon nine times at a fleeing bad guy. With the temperature near zero, he got into an extended debate with a producer, arguing that his character was too skilled with a gun to keep missing like that.
His obstinacy, integrity and occasional storminess bled into his characters and became a major part of his appeal, making him an alluring figure to moviegoers unstirred by Mr. Beatty or another classic leading man of the time, Robert Redford.
His life experience further set him apart from his hunkier rivals. He worked in a steel mill one summer during his high school years and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps at age 17. After putting in four years of military service, he earned his living as a shoe salesman, a soda jerk, a truck driver, a janitor and a doorman while trying to make a name for himself in New York and California.
He was constantly underestimated. As a 26-year-old would-be professional, he was drummed out of the Pasadena Playhouse for having 'no talent," he said. A decade later, he was fired from the cast of 'The Graduate' during rehearsals.
He stoked his resentment against those who had slighted him and used it as fuel. Francis Ford Coppola said Mr. Hackman seemed utterly miserable during the filming of the 1974 surveillance thriller 'The Conversation.' Well, he had his reasons for his low mood on set. 'The misery was partially Coppola's fault,' he explained in an interview with The New York Times, 'because he had let it be known that he wanted [Marlon] Brando for that role, and Brando didn't want to do it. I loved the idea of the role, but I also knew that I was second choice.'
Most actors are flattered when an acclaimed auteur writes them a part. But Mr. Hackman was flat-out irritated when Wes Anderson told him he was writing a character — the mercurial patriarch Royal Tenenbaum — specifically for him. 'He said, 'I don't like it when people write for me, because you don't know me, and I don't want what you think is me,'" Mr. Anderson recalled.
During the making of 'The Royal Tenenbaums,' Mr. Hackman gave Mr. Anderson hell and alienated his fellow cast members. Ten years later, during an anniversary screening of the movie at the New York Film Festival, his co-stars Anjelica Huston and Bill Murray publicly called him out for his behavior.
Mr. Hackman had simply not bothered to tell anyone that his obstreperousness was part of his grouchy, old-school process. 'There was great love on the set,' he said in an interview shortly after the film was released. 'Yet at the same time I was very conflicted, because people were much younger than me and I felt left out or ignored. And that wasn't even true. I knew it wasn't true, but I used it anyway.'
As a child of the Depression in Danville, Ill., he dreamed of becoming an actor. But when he compared himself to the square-jawed swashbucklers on the silver screen, he felt unworthy of his ambition, even ashamed of himself for entertaining the notion that he could be a star.
'I would come out of the theater having seen an Errol Flynn movie and look in the mirror in the lobby of the theater and be stunned that I didn't look like that guy,' he said in a 1986 interview. 'I desperately wanted to do it, but I never really thought I could until much later.'
It turned out that Mr. Hackman possessed something better than mere handsomeness. It was a stubborn life force that couldn't help but come through whenever he was on camera. It made him more memorable than any matinee idol.