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The Age
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
For 20 years this novel has reduced the most hardened critics to tears
For more than a decade, Kazuo Ishiguro had a box file in his study marked 'Students Novel'. In it were notes, diagrams and some pages of a story he'd tried to write in 1990, then again in 1995. Each time he'd abandoned the attempt and had written a completely different novel. He knew his students would share a strange destiny that would shorten their lives but also make them feel special. But what would that destiny be? Here was where he got stuck. He'd played around with ideas such as a virus or radioactive poisoning, but it all seemed too melodramatic. In 2001, he returned to his project with fresh ideas. They were inspired partly by new developments in science, and partly by the contact he'd had with a new generation of British writers such as Alex Garland and David Mitchell. While Ishiguro had come of age in an era when literary fiction avoided any whiff of 'popular' genres, the younger writers had no such qualms. They blithely incorporated all sorts of influences from science fiction, fantasy and horror into their work. 'My growing familiarity with these younger colleagues excited and liberated me', Ishiguro writes. 'They opened windows for me I'd not thought to open before. They not only educated me into a wider, vibrant culture, they brought to my own imagination new horizons.' He writes this in his introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of Never Let Me Go, the extraordinary novel that gradually emerged from those early notes. It's the Nobel Prize winner's most-read novel, has sold in millions, is widely studied and has been translated into 50 languages. It's been adapted into a film, two stage plays and a Japanese TV series. Like many fans, I remember vividly my first reading. It starts so quietly, narrated in simple and artless prose by Kathy, a student at Hailsham, a mysterious boarding school in the English countryside with kind teachers and a nostalgic Enid-Blyton feel. We follow the everyday lives of Kathy and her two schoolfriends, Ruth and Tommy, as they grow into young adults. Gradually the purpose of the school is revealed. I won't give it away except to say there's a dark future for these idealistic, hopeful kids and their tender feelings for one another. Talking of tender feelings, this is a novel that reduces the most hardened critics to tears. 'No matter how many times I read it … it breaks my heart all over again,' writes Alix Ohlin in the Los Angeles Review of Books. 'I was nothing less than stunned by it,' David Sexton writes in the New Statesman. He reread it on a day ferry when he was a judge for the 2005 Booker Prize (it nearly won, but the casting vote went to John Banville's The Sea) and was glad he was in a windowless cabin, 'so tearful it made me'.
Sydney Morning Herald
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
For 20 years this novel has reduced the most hardened critics to tears
For more than a decade, Kazuo Ishiguro had a box file in his study marked 'Students Novel'. In it were notes, diagrams and some pages of a story he'd tried to write in 1990, then again in 1995. Each time he'd abandoned the attempt and had written a completely different novel. He knew his students would share a strange destiny that would shorten their lives but also make them feel special. But what would that destiny be? Here was where he got stuck. He'd played around with ideas such as a virus or radioactive poisoning, but it all seemed too melodramatic. In 2001, he returned to his project with fresh ideas. They were inspired partly by new developments in science, and partly by the contact he'd had with a new generation of British writers such as Alex Garland and David Mitchell. While Ishiguro had come of age in an era when literary fiction avoided any whiff of 'popular' genres, the younger writers had no such qualms. They blithely incorporated all sorts of influences from science fiction, fantasy and horror into their work. 'My growing familiarity with these younger colleagues excited and liberated me', Ishiguro writes. 'They opened windows for me I'd not thought to open before. They not only educated me into a wider, vibrant culture, they brought to my own imagination new horizons.' He writes this in his introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of Never Let Me Go, the extraordinary novel that gradually emerged from those early notes. It's the Nobel Prize winner's most-read novel, has sold in millions, is widely studied and has been translated into 50 languages. It's been adapted into a film, two stage plays and a Japanese TV series. Like many fans, I remember vividly my first reading. It starts so quietly, narrated in simple and artless prose by Kathy, a student at Hailsham, a mysterious boarding school in the English countryside with kind teachers and a nostalgic Enid-Blyton feel. We follow the everyday lives of Kathy and her two schoolfriends, Ruth and Tommy, as they grow into young adults. Gradually the purpose of the school is revealed. I won't give it away except to say there's a dark future for these idealistic, hopeful kids and their tender feelings for one another. Talking of tender feelings, this is a novel that reduces the most hardened critics to tears. 'No matter how many times I read it … it breaks my heart all over again,' writes Alix Ohlin in the Los Angeles Review of Books. 'I was nothing less than stunned by it,' David Sexton writes in the New Statesman. He reread it on a day ferry when he was a judge for the 2005 Booker Prize (it nearly won, but the casting vote went to John Banville's The Sea) and was glad he was in a windowless cabin, 'so tearful it made me'.
The Hill
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hill
Actor Gene Hackman, wife found dead at home
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Gene Hackman, the prolific Oscar-winning actor whose studied portraits ranged from reluctant heroes to conniving villains and made him one of the industry's most respected and honored performers, has been found dead along with his wife at their home. He was 95. Hackman was a frequent and versatile presence on screen from the 1960s into the 20th century. His dozens of films included the Academy Award favorites 'The French Connection' and 'Unforgiven,' a breakout performance in 'Bonnie and Clyde,' a classic bit of farce in 'Young Frankenstein' and featured parts in 'Reds' and 'No Way Out.' He seemed capable of any kind of role — whether an uptight buffoon in 'Birdcage,' a college coach finding redemption in the sentimental favorite 'Hoosiers' or a secretive surveillance expert in the Watergate-era release 'The Conversation.' Although self-effacing and unfashionable, Hackman held special status within Hollywood — heir to Spencer Tracy as an every man, actor's actor, curmudgeon and reluctant celebrity. He embodied the ethos of doing his job, doing it very well, and letting others worry about his image. Beyond the obligatory appearances at awards ceremonies, he was rarely seen on the social circuit and made no secret of his disdain for the business side of show business. 'Actors tend to be shy people,' he told Film Comment in 1988. 'There is perhaps a component of hostility in that shyness, and to reach a point where you don't deal with others in a hostile or angry way, you choose this medium for yourself … Then you can express yourself and get this wonderful feedback.' He was an early retiree — essentially done, by choice, with movies by his mid-70s — and a late bloomer. Hackman was 35 when cast for 'Bonnie and Clyde' and past 40 when he won his first Oscar, as the rules-bending New York City detective Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle in the 1971 thriller about tracking down Manhattan drug smugglers, 'The French Connection.' Jackie Gleason, Steve McQueen and Peter Boyle were among the actors considered for Doyle. Hackman was a minor star at the time, seemingly without the flamboyant personality that the role demanded. The actor himself feared that he was miscast. A couple of weeks of nighttime patrols of Harlem in police cars helped reassure him. One of the first scenes of 'The French Connection' required Hackman to slap around a suspect. The actor realized he had failed to achieve the intensity that the scene required, and asked director William Friedkin for another chance. The scene was filmed at the end of the shooting, by which time Hackman had immersed himself in the loose-cannon character of Popeye Doyle. Friedkin would recall needing 37 takes to get the scene right. 'I had to arouse an anger in Gene that was lying dormant, I felt, within him — that he was sort of ashamed of and didn't really want to revisit,' Friedkin told the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2012. The most famous sequence was dangerously realistic: A car chase in which Det. Doyle speeds under elevated subway tracks, his brown Pontiac (driven by a stuntman) screeching into areas that the filmmakers had not received permits for. When Doyle crashes into a white Ford, it wasn't a stuntman driving the other car, but a New York City resident who didn't know a movie was being made. Hackman also resisted the role which brought him his second Oscar. When Clint Eastwood first offered him Little Bill Daggett, the corrupt town boss in 'Unforgiven,' Hackman turned it down. But he realized that Eastwood was planning to make a different kind of western, a critique, not a celebration of violence. The film won him the Academy Award as best supporting actor of 1992. 'To his credit, and my joy, he talked me into it,' Hackman said of Eastwood during an interview with the American Film Institute. Eugene Allen Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California, and grew up in Danville, Illinois, where his father worked as a pressman for the Commercial-News. His parents fought repeatedly, and his father often used his fists on Gene to take out his rage. The boy found refuge in movie houses, identifying with such screen rebels as Errol Flynn and James Cagney as his role models. When Gene was 13, his father waved goodbye and drove off, never to return. The abandonment was a lasting injury to Gene. His mother had become an alcoholic and was constantly at odds with her mother, with whom the shattered family lived (Gene had a younger brother, actor Richard Hackman). At 16, he 'suddenly got the itch to get out.' Lying about his age, he enlisted in the U.S. Marines. In his early 30s, before his film career took off, his mother died in a fire started by her own cigarette. 'Dysfunctional families have sired a lot of pretty good actors,' he observed ironically during a 2001 interview with The New York Times. His brawling and resistance to authority led to his being demoted from corporal three times. His taste of show business came when he conquered his mic fright and became disc jockey and news announcer on his unit's radio station. With a high school degree he earned during his time as a Marine, Hackman enrolled in journalism at the University of Illinois. He dropped out after six months to study radio announcing in New York. After working at stations in Florida and his hometown of Danville, he returned to New York to study painting at the Art Students League. Hackman switched again to enter an acting course at the Pasadena Playhouse. Back in New York, he found work as a doorman and truck driver among other jobs waiting for a break as an actor, sweating it out with such fellow hopefuls as Robert Duvall and Dustin Hoffman. Summer work at a theater on Long Island led to roles off-Broadway. Hackman began attracting attention from Broadway producers, and he received good notices in such plays as 'Any Wednesday,' with Sandy Dennis, and 'Poor Richard,' with Alan Bates. During a tryout in New Haven for another play, Hackman was seen by film director Robert Rossen, who hired him for a brief role in 'Lilith,' which starred Warren Beatty and Jean Seberg. He played small roles in other films, including 'Hawaii,' and leads in television dramas of the early 1960s such as 'The Defenders' and 'Naked City.' When Beatty began work on 'Bonnie and Clyde,' which he produced and starred in, he remembered Hackman and cast him as bank robber Clyde Barrow's outgoing brother. Pauline Kael in the New Yorker called Hackman's work 'a beautifully controlled performance, the best in the film,' and he was nominated for an Academy Award as supporting actor. Hackman nearly appeared in another immortal film of 1967, 'The Graduate.' He was supposed to play the cuckolded husband of Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), but director Mike Nichols decided he was too young and replaced him with Murray Hamilton. Two years later, he was considered for what became one of television's most famous roles, patriarch Mike Brady of 'The Brady Bunch.' Producer Sherwood Schwartz wanted Hackman to audition, but network executives thought he was too obscure. (The part went to Robert Reed). Hackman's first starring film role came in 1970 with 'I Never Sang for My Father,' as a man struggling to deal with a failed relationship with his dying father, Melvyn Douglas. Because of Hackman's distress over his own father, he resisted connecting to the role. In his 2001 Times interview, he recalled: 'Douglas told me, `Gene, you'll never get what you want with the way you're acting.' And he didn't mean acting; he meant I was not behaving myself. He taught me not to use my reservations as an excuse for not doing the job.' Even though he had the central part, Hackman was Oscar-nominated as supporting actor and Douglas as lead. The following year he won the Oscar as best actor for 'The French Connection.' Through the years, Hackman kept working, in pictures good and bad. For a time he seemed to be in a contest with Michael Caine for the world's busiest Oscar winner. In 2001 alone, he appeared in 'The Mexican,' 'Heartbreakers,' 'Heist,' 'The Royal Tenenbaums' and 'Behind Enemy Lines.' But by 2004, he was openly talking about retirement, telling Larry King he had no projects lined up. His only credit in recent years was narrating a Smithsonian Channel documentary, 'The Unknown Flag Raiser of Iwo Jima.' In 1956, Hackman married Fay Maltese, a bank teller he had met at a YMCA dance in New York. They had a son, Christopher, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Leslie, but divorced in the mid-1980s. In 1991 he married Betsy Arakawa, a classical pianist. When not on film locations, Hackman enjoyed painting, stunt flying, stock car racing and deep sea diving. In his latter years, he wrote novels and lived on his ranch in Sante Fe, New Mexico, on a hilltop looking out on the Colorado Rockies, a view he preferred to his films that popped up on television. 'I'll watch maybe five minutes of it,' he once told Time magazine, 'and I'll get this icky feeling, and I turn the channel.'
Boston Globe
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Actor Gene Hackman, prolific Oscar winner, found dead at home at 95 years old
Although self-effacing and unfashionable, Hackman held special status within Hollywood — heir to Spencer Tracy as an every man, actor's actor, curmudgeon and reluctant celebrity. He embodied the ethos of doing his job, doing it very well, and letting others worry about his image. Beyond the obligatory appearances at awards ceremonies, he was rarely seen on the social circuit and made no secret of his disdain for the business side of show business. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'Actors tend to be shy people,' he told Film Comment in 1988. 'There is perhaps a component of hostility in that shyness, and to reach a point where you don't deal with others in a hostile or angry way, you choose this medium for yourself ... Then you can express yourself and get this wonderful feedback.' He was an early retiree — essentially done, by choice, with movies by his mid-70s — and a late bloomer. Hackman was 35 when cast for 'Bonnie and Clyde' and past 40 when he won his first Oscar, as the rules-bending New York City detective Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle in the 1971 thriller about tracking down Manhattan drug smugglers, 'The French Connection.' Jackie Gleason, Steve McQueen and Peter Boyle were among the actors considered for Doyle. Hackman was a minor star at the time, seemingly without the flamboyant personality that the role demanded. The actor himself feared that he was miscast. A couple of weeks of nighttime patrols of Harlem in police cars helped reassure him. Advertisement One of the first scenes of 'The French Connection' required Hackman to slap around a suspect. The actor realized he had failed to achieve the intensity that the scene required, and asked director William Friedkin for another chance. The scene was filmed at the end of the shooting, by which time Hackman had immersed himself in the loose-cannon character of Popeye Doyle. Friedkin would recall needing 37 takes to get the scene right. 'I had to arouse an anger in Gene that was lying dormant, I felt, within him — that he was sort of ashamed of and didn't really want to revisit,' Friedkin told the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2012. The most famous sequence was dangerously realistic: A car chase in which Det. Doyle speeds under elevated subway tracks, his brown Pontiac (driven by a stuntman) screeching into areas that the filmmakers had not received permits for. When Doyle crashes into a white Ford, it wasn't a stuntman driving the other car, but a New York City resident who didn't know a movie was being made. Hackman also resisted the role which brought him his second Oscar. When Clint Eastwood first offered him Little Bill Daggett, the corrupt town boss in 'Unforgiven,' Hackman turned it down. But he realized that Eastwood was planning to make a different kind of western, a critique, not a celebration of violence. The film won him the Academy Award as best supporting actor of 1992. 'To his credit, and my joy, he talked me into it,' Hackman said of Eastwood during an interview with the American Film Institute. Advertisement Eugene Allen Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California, and grew up in Danville, Illinois, where his father worked as a pressman for the Commercial-News. His parents fought repeatedly, and his father often used his fists on Gene to take out his rage. The boy found refuge in movie houses, identifying with such screen rebels as Errol Flynn and James Cagney as his role models. When Gene was 13, his father waved goodbye and drove off, never to return. The abandonment was a lasting injury to Gene. His mother had become an alcoholic and was constantly at odds with her mother, with whom the shattered family lived (Gene had a younger brother, actor Richard Hackman). At 16, he 'suddenly got the itch to get out.' Lying about his age, he enlisted in the U.S. Marines. In his early 30s, before his film career took off, his mother died in a fire started by her own cigarette. 'Dysfunctional families have sired a lot of pretty good actors,' he observed ironically during a 2001 interview with The New York Times. His brawling and resistance to authority led to his being demoted from corporal three times. His taste of show business came when he conquered his mic fright and became disc jockey and news announcer on his unit's radio station. With a high school degree he earned during his time as a Marine, Hackman enrolled in journalism at the University of Illinois. He dropped out after six months to study radio announcing in New York. After working at stations in Florida and his hometown of Danville, he returned to New York to study painting at the Art Students League. Hackman switched again to enter an acting course at the Pasadena Playhouse. Advertisement Back in New York, he found work as a doorman and truck driver among other jobs waiting for a break as an actor, sweating it out with such fellow hopefuls as Robert Duvall and Dustin Hoffman. Summer work at a theater on Long Island led to roles off-Broadway. Hackman began attracting attention from Broadway producers, and he received good notices in such plays as 'Any Wednesday,' with Sandy Dennis, and 'Poor Richard,' with Alan Bates. During a tryout in New Haven for another play, Hackman was seen by film director Robert Rossen, who hired him for a brief role in 'Lilith,' which starred Warren Beatty and Jean Seberg. He played small roles in other films, including 'Hawaii,' and leads in television dramas of the early 1960s such as 'The Defenders' and 'Naked City.' When Beatty began work on 'Bonnie and Clyde,' which he produced and starred in, he remembered Hackman and cast him as bank robber Clyde Barrow's outgoing brother. Pauline Kael in the New Yorker called Hackman's work 'a beautifully controlled performance, the best in the film,' and he was nominated for an Academy Award as supporting actor. Hackman nearly appeared in another immortal film of 1967, 'The Graduate.' He was supposed to play the cuckolded husband of Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), but director Mike Nichols decided he was too young and replaced him with Murray Hamilton. Two years later, he was considered for what became one of television's most famous roles, patriarch Mike Brady of 'The Brady Bunch.' Producer Sherwood Schwartz wanted Hackman to audition, but network executives thought he was too obscure. (The part went to Robert Reed). Advertisement Hackman's first starring film role came in 1970 with 'I Never Sang for My Father,' as a man struggling to deal with a failed relationship with his dying father, Melvyn Douglas. Because of Hackman's distress over his own father, he resisted connecting to the role. In his 2001 Times interview, he recalled: 'Douglas told me, `Gene, you'll never get what you want with the way you're acting.' And he didn't mean acting; he meant I was not behaving myself. He taught me not to use my reservations as an excuse for not doing the job.' Even though he had the central part, Hackman was Oscar-nominated as supporting actor and Douglas as lead. The following year he won the Oscar as best actor for 'The French Connection.' Through the years, Hackman kept working, in pictures good and bad. For a time he seemed to be in a contest with Michael Caine for the world's busiest Oscar winner. In 2001 alone, he appeared in 'The Mexican,' 'Heartbreakers,' 'Heist,' 'The Royal Tenenbaums' and 'Behind Enemy Lines.' But by 2004, he was openly talking about retirement, telling Larry King he had no projects lined up. His only credit in recent years was narrating a Smithsonian Channel documentary, 'The Unknown Flag Raiser of Iwo Jima.' In 1956, Hackman married Fay Maltese, a bank teller he had met at a YMCA dance in New York. They had a son, Christopher, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Leslie, but divorced in the mid-1980s. In 1991 he married Betsy Arakawa, a classical pianist. When not on film locations, Hackman enjoyed painting, stunt flying, stock car racing and deep sea diving. In his latter years, he wrote novels and lived on his ranch in Sante Fe, New Mexico, on a hilltop looking out on the Colorado Rockies, a view he preferred to his films that popped up on television. 'I'll watch maybe five minutes of it,' he once told Time magazine, 'and I'll get this icky feeling, and I turn the channel.' Bob Thomas, a longtime Associated Press journalist who died in 2014, compiled biographical material for this obituary.
The Independent
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Actor Gene Hackman, prolific Oscar winner, found dead at home at 95 years old
Gene Hackman, the prolific Oscar-winning actor whose studied portraits ranged from reluctant heroes to conniving villains and made him one of the industry's most respected and honored performers, has been found dead along with his wife at their home. He was 95. Hackman was a frequent and versatile presence on screen from the 1960s into the 20th century. His dozens of films included the Academy Award favorites 'The French Connection' and 'Unforgiven,' a breakout performance in 'Bonnie and Clyde,' a classic bit of farce in 'Young Frankenstein' and featured parts in 'Reds' and 'No Way Out.' He seemed capable of any kind of role — whether an uptight buffoon in 'Birdcage,' a college coach finding redemption in the sentimental favorite 'Hoosiers' or a secretive surveillance expert in the Watergate-era release 'The Conversation.' Although self-effacing and unfashionable, Hackman held special status within Hollywood — heir to Spencer Tracy as an every man, actor's actor, curmudgeon and reluctant celebrity. He embodied the ethos of doing his job, doing it very well, and letting others worry about his image. Beyond the obligatory appearances at awards ceremonies, he was rarely seen on the social circuit and made no secret of his disdain for the business side of show business. 'Actors tend to be shy people,' he told Film Comment in 1988. 'There is perhaps a component of hostility in that shyness, and to reach a point where you don't deal with others in a hostile or angry way, you choose this medium for yourself ... Then you can express yourself and get this wonderful feedback.' He was an early retiree — essentially done, by choice, with movies by his mid-70s — and a late bloomer. Hackman was 35 when cast for 'Bonnie and Clyde' and past 40 when he won his first Oscar, as the rules-bending New York City detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle in the 1971 thriller about tracking down Manhattan drug smugglers, "The French Connection." Jackie Gleason, Steve McQueen and Peter Boyle were among the actors considered for Doyle. Hackman was a minor star at the time, seemingly without the flamboyant personality that the role demanded. The actor himself feared that he was miscast. A couple of weeks of nighttime patrols of Harlem in police cars helped reassure him. One of the first scenes of "The French Connection" required Hackman to slap around a suspect. The actor realized he had failed to achieve the intensity that the scene required, and asked director William Friedkin for another chance. The scene was filmed at the end of the shooting, by which time Hackman had immersed himself in the loose-cannon character of Popeye Doyle. Friedkin would recall needing 37 takes to get the scene right. 'I had to arouse an anger in Gene that was lying dormant, I felt, within him — that he was sort of ashamed of and didn't really want to revisit,' Friedkin told the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2012. The most famous sequence was dangerously realistic: A car chase in which Det. Doyle speeds under elevated subway tracks, his brown Pontiac (driven by a stuntman) screeching into areas that the filmmakers had not received permits for. When Doyle crashes into a white Ford, it wasn't a stuntman driving the other car, but a New York City resident who didn't know a movie was being made. Hackman also resisted the role which brought him his second Oscar. When Clint Eastwood first offered him Little Bill Daggett, the corrupt town boss in "Unforgiven," Hackman turned it down. But he realized that Eastwood was planning to make a different kind of western, a critique, not a celebration of violence. The film won him the Academy Award as best supporting actor of 1992. 'To his credit, and my joy, he talked me into it,' Hackman said of Eastwood during an interview with the American Film Institute. Eugene Allen Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California, and grew up in Danville, Illinois, where his father worked as a pressman for the Commercial-News. His parents fought repeatedly, and his father often used his fists on Gene to take out his rage. The boy found refuge in movie houses, identifying with such screen rebels as Errol Flynn and James Cagney as his role models. When Gene was 13, his father waved goodbye and drove off, never to return. The abandonment was a lasting injury to Gene. His mother had become an alcoholic and was constantly at odds with her mother, with whom the shattered family lived (Gene had a younger brother, actor Richard Hackman). At 16, he "suddenly got the itch to get out." Lying about his age, he enlisted in the U.S. Marines. In his early 30s, before his film career took off, his mother died in a fire started by her own cigarette. "Dysfunctional families have sired a lot of pretty good actors," he observed ironically during a 2001 interview with The New York Times. His brawling and resistance to authority led to his being demoted from corporal three times. His taste of show business came when he conquered his mic fright and became disc jockey and news announcer on his unit's radio station. With a high school degree he earned during his time as a Marine, Hackman enrolled in journalism at the University of Illinois. He dropped out after six months to study radio announcing in New York. After working at stations in Florida and his hometown of Danville, he returned to New York to study painting at the Art Students League. Hackman switched again to enter an acting course at the Pasadena Playhouse. Back in New York, he found work as a doorman and truck driver among other jobs waiting for a break as an actor, sweating it out with such fellow hopefuls as Robert Duvall and Dustin Hoffman. Summer work at a theater on Long Island led to roles off-Broadway. Hackman began attracting attention from Broadway producers, and he received good notices in such plays as "Any Wednesday," with Sandy Dennis, and "Poor Richard," with Alan Bates. During a tryout in New Haven for another play, Hackman was seen by film director Robert Rossen, who hired him for a brief role in "Lilith," which starred Warren Beatty and Jean Seberg. He played small roles in other films, including "Hawaii," and leads in television dramas of the early 1960s such as "The Defenders" and "Naked City." When Beatty began work on "Bonnie and Clyde," which he produced and starred in, he remembered Hackman and cast him as bank robber Clyde Barrow's outgoing brother. Pauline Kael in the New Yorker called Hackman's work "a beautifully controlled performance, the best in the film," and he was nominated for an Academy Award as supporting actor. Hackman nearly appeared in another immortal film of 1967, 'The Graduate.' He was supposed to play the cuckolded husband of Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), but director Mike Nichols decided he was too young and replaced him with Murray Hamilton. Two years later, he was considered for what became one of television's most famous roles, patriarch Mike Brady of 'The Brady Bunch.' Producer Sherwood Schwartz wanted Hackman to audition, but network executives thought he was too obscure. (The part went to Robert Reed). Hackman's first starring film role came in 1970 with "I Never Sang for My Father," as a man struggling to deal with a failed relationship with his dying father, Melvyn Douglas. Because of Hackman's distress over his own father, he resisted connecting to the role. In his 2001 Times interview, he recalled: "Douglas told me, `Gene, you'll never get what you want with the way you're acting.' And he didn't mean acting; he meant I was not behaving myself. He taught me not to use my reservations as an excuse for not doing the job." Even though he had the central part, Hackman was Oscar-nominated as supporting actor and Douglas as lead. The following year he won the Oscar as best actor for "The French Connection." Through the years, Hackman kept working, in pictures good and bad. For a time he seemed to be in a contest with Michael Caine for the world's busiest Oscar winner. In 2001 alone, he appeared in "The Mexican," "Heartbreakers," "Heist," "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "Behind Enemy Lines." But by 2004, he was openly talking about retirement, telling Larry King he had no projects lined up. His only credit in recent years was narrating a Smithsonian Channel documentary, 'The Unknown Flag Raiser of Iwo Jima.' In 1956, Hackman married Fay Maltese, a bank teller he had met at a YMCA dance in New York. They had a son, Christopher, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Leslie, but divorced in the mid-1980s. In 1991 he married Betsy Arakawa, a classical pianist. When not on film locations, Hackman enjoyed painting, stunt flying, stock car racing and deep sea diving. In his latter years, he wrote novels and lived on his ranch in Sante Fe, New Mexico, on a hilltop looking out on the Colorado Rockies, a view he preferred to his films that popped up on television. 'I'll watch maybe five minutes of it,' he once told Time magazine, 'and I'll get this icky feeling, and I turn the channel.' ___ Bob Thomas, a longtime Associated Press journalist who died in 2014, compiled biographical material for this obituary.
