Gene Hackman was the actor’s actor, that rare creature who lived uncomfortably in the spotlight but who somehow found his way from the back suburbs of Los Angeles to the apex of its entertainment industry.
When he retired two decades ago, he walked away with no regrets. It was clean cut, dispassionate and done with precision. Lesser actors would have dealt with separation from Hollywood differently. Hackman left it with such ease that you almost wondered why he chased it in the first place.
Gene Hackman in 1992.Credit: Roadshow
“I miss the actual acting part of it, as it’s what I did for almost 60 years, and I really loved that,” he said at the time.
“But the business for me is very stressful. The compromises that you have to make in films are just part of the beast, and it had gotten to a point where I just didn’t feel like I wanted to do it any more.”
What he left then, and what he leaves behind now, is a complex tapestry of human emotions, woven through illuminating performances which stunned us, made us cry, and, far more often than Hackman’s serious demeanour might suggest, left us weeping with laughter.
Great actors are always an amalgam of dark brilliance and whimsy. Hackman is the guy whose success was built on robust classic such as the thriller The French Connection and the war movie A Bridge Too Far. He’s also the guy whose turn as a blind man in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein was one of the film’s most hilarious touches, and who gave Christopher Reeve’s Superman a nemesis in supervillain Lex Luthor who was his equal.
It’s a lot for an actor who, in the 1950s, joined the Pasadena Playhouse in California and was, along with Dustin Hoffman, seen as the class dunces. Neither was expected to do very much. Between them, they netted four Oscars and nine Golden Globes. A couple of dunces indeed.
Hackman’s brilliance was that he could turn very little into something extraordinary. In Young Frankenstein, his blind man, whose short-sighted enthusiasm turned Peter Boyle’s monster into a sobbing mess, had less than a few minutes of screen time. To this day, fans treasure the performance.
In Irwin Allen’s The Poseidon Adventure, he turned the role of a disillusioned priest in a stock-standard disaster movie into a polemic on faith.
“What more do you want of us?” his Reverend Scott screamed, eyes cast upward. “We’ve come all this way, no thanks to you. We did it on our own, no help from you. We did ask you to fight for us but damn it, don’t fight against us.”
Credit: SMH
Unlike most actors of his generation, Hackman didn’t chase million-dollar roles. His most memorable roles were nuanced. And sometimes small. He picked them for great writing. Or for the fine print.
Though he won two Oscars, when he was asked in retirement to reveal where he kept them, he could not say.
“I don’t have any memorabilia around the house,” he said. “There isn’t any movie stuff except a poster downstairs next to the pool table of Errol Flynn from Dawn Patrol. I’m not a sentimental guy.”
Gene Hackman poses with his Cecil B. De Mille Award backstage during the Golden Globe Awards in 2003.Credit: Getty Images
That’s hard to fathom. As Royal Tenenbaum in The Royal Tenenbaums, he was all sentiment. As Reverend Frank Scott, he wrestled with his very soul. And as the blind man in Young Frankenstein, once the laughter subsided, his loneliness was totally overwhelming. Or maybe, like a great actor, he saved all his sentiment for the screen.
In that sense, Hackman’s death will cut deep in Hollywood. News of it surfaced after midnight, local time, just a few days before the 97th annual Academy Awards. The city is already nursing a deep wound in the wake of horrific fires. Now Oscar must exalt the motion picture arts and sciences while mourning the loss of one of its most gifted sons.
In his 2011 GQ interview, he had a simple wish for how he wanted to be remembered: “As a decent actor,” he said. “As someone who tried to portray what was given to them in an honest fashion. I don’t know, beyond that. I don’t think about that often.”
Michael Idato is the culture editor-at-large of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.