Gene Hackman: The Last Great Everyman

Gene Hackman, who has died aged 95 under mysterious circumstances, was an actor of such unassuming brilliance that it is easy to take for granted just how consistently he delivered performances of raw, lived-in authenticity. A central figure of the American ‘New Wave’ of the 1970s, Hackman stood shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Warren Beatty, James Caan, Robert De Niro. Yet unlike them, he possessed neither the countercultural magnetism of Nicholson nor the simmering intensity of Pacino or De Niro. He was, instead, a master of the unvarnished, the unpretentious, the sublimely natural.

Like Robert Duvall, Hackman was often referred to as an ‘actor’s actor,’ but that designation risks understating just how much of an elemental force he was.

His breakthrough came in 1967’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ in which he played Buck Barrow, the doomed, amiable brother to Warren Beatty’s Clyde. In ‘I Never Sang for My Father’ (1970), where he played a widowed college professor navigating the difficult terrain of familial duty, he fully demonstrated his great range.

Then came ‘The French Connection’ (1971), and with it, cinematic immortality. As Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle - the coarse, unrelenting narcotics detective rampaging relentlessly through the streets of New York in pursuit of a French heroin kingpin, Hackman’s Oscar-winning performance was as combustible as it was convincing.

The 1970s, the finest decade of Hackman’s career, was a time when American cinema embraced ambiguity, moral complexity and a kind of grounded realism. Few embodied this era more effectively than Hackman, whose face seemed to belong less to the realm of movie stars than to that of real people - working men, cops, criminals, politicians, coaches, spies. There was ‘Scarecrow’ (1973), an understated gem in which he and Pacino played vagabonds drifting through the American landscape, each as broken as the other.

There was ‘Night Moves’ (1975), Arthur Penn’s brooding neo-noir in which he played a detective struggling to make sense of his unravelling world.

But his greatest performance came in Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Conversation’ (1974), a role for which he incredibly wasn’t even nominated. As Harry Caul, a surveillance expert so consumed by paranoia that he can barely function, Hackman eschewed his usual volatility, replacing it with a wound-up performance of restrained anguish that made his very presence feel like an act of concealment. The final scene, with Caul alone in his wrecked apartment, sawing away at the floorboards in a fruitless search for hidden bugs, is as haunting as anything the decade produced.

Hackman’s versatility extended well beyond the brooding antiheroes of the 1970s. He possessed an easy facility for comedy, often slipping into a wry, world-weary charm that underscored the absurdity of his characters’ situations. His Lex Luthor in ‘Superman’ (1978) - bald cap askance, chewing scenery with a mischievous twinkle - was a gleeful departure from the hard-bitten men he so often played. In ‘Get Shorty’ (1995), as the hapless Hollywood producer Harry Zimm, he delivered a masterclass in comedic timing.

While he was at home in the cynical, auteur-driven cinema of the 1970s, Hackman didn’t fade with the arrival of the blockbuster era. He was splendid the beleaguered high-school basketball coach in ‘Hoosiers’ (1986), the compromised Secretary of Defense in ‘No Way Out’ (1987), and especially as the maverick FBI agent fighting the Ku Klux Klan in the searing ‘Mississippi Burning’ (1988), a role that earned him another Oscar nomination. Playing against Willem Dafoe’s by-the-book idealist, Hackman brought a blend of charm and barely contained fury to the role, turning Anderson into a man whose folksy affability masked a relentless, dangerous intelligence.

Hackman cemented his legacy with Clint Eastwood’s ‘Unforgiven’ (1992), where he was cast him as ‘Little Bill’ Daggett, a sadistic sheriff with a perverse sense of justice. It was a role Hackman initially resisted, wary of its brutality, but his eventual performance - alternately jovial and truly terrifying - earned him his second Oscar.

Unlike many of his peers, Hackman knew when to walk away. He retired from acting in 2004, resisting the temptation of late-career indulgences, avoiding the spotlight. Watching him, one is struck not by artifice but by a lived-in truth. His gift was making us believe in the reality of his characters, whether they were cops, criminals or coaches, each as flawed and contradictory as the world around them. He made it all look effortless. He was, quite simply, the real thing.