Our favourite Gene Hackman performances

Gene Hackman, who has died at 95, was a stunner in great movies and the best thing in many bad ones – a rumpled, roiling, always complex and often combustible presence who helped define the New Hollywood of the late ’60s and ’70s before going on to a varied and generous career. These are some of our favourite Hackman performances.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Bonnie and Clyde landed as a new kind of violent, of-the-moment but mythically immortal American movie, but with Hackman’s supporting role it more quietly announced the emergence of a new kind of American star: the everyman actor. Watch Hackman, in a famous robbery scene, leap over a bank counter while very much looking like a bank teller himself. As the gang (led by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty’s title characters) confidently exits, Hackman pulls down an elderly guard’s shades and says, with that signature glint: “Take a good look, Pop. I’m Buck Barrow.” In her New Yorker review, Pauline Kael called it a “beautifully controlled performance, the best in the film.” He was 37 – and just getting started.
Jonathan Fischer

The French Connection (1971)

A man walks into a bar. Specifically, the hothead New York police detective Popeye Doyle walks into the Copa to meet another cop for a drink. In a few small, silent gestures, Hackman shows us so much about this character. He is an extrovert who loves the nightlife – his face lighting up as he strolls through the lively room, finger-guns with the bartender, bobs his head to the music, greets a woman with a kiss on the lips. Then, he clocks a small-time mobster across the room, and the ease drains from his face, as the actor plays a cop who is himself an actor – trying to act natural, trying to look like he is having fun, while stealthily keeping his target in his sites. Hackman was a profoundly ordinary-looking man, but the charisma that made him a star lived in those alert eyes, forever casing whatever joint he happened to be in.
Amy Argetsinger

The Conversation (1974)

As a Hoosier, it’s Hoosiers. As a paranoid, it’s The Conversation. I watched this movie my first night living away from home, very alone and hyper-aware of strangers’ talk through dorm walls. Crucial stretches of the film depend on millimetre twitches of Hackman’s eyebrows and lips as he listens to tape. He stumbles over words and doesn’t finish sentences. Long after the movie’s plot has dissolved into a series of vibes, you’ll remember its final image: Hackman playing saxophone in a room where every inch he has carefully, then madly, dismantled in a bug hunt – an avatar for anyone who’s tried to stay sane in a forest of Bluetooth beacons, spyware, and maybe-maybe-not eavesdropping smartphones.
Steven Johnson

Young Frankenstein (1974)

Under the beard, yes, that’s Hackman as the blind befriender of the Monster in Young Frankenstein – and in classic Mel Brooks form, not at all a politically correct role. But it’s proof that Hackman, known for gruff, dramatic roles, had a funny bone and could deliver a memorable cameo.
Nora Simon

Superman movies (1978-1987)

Hackman is adored by comic book movie fans for his bombastic performance as Lex Luthor, bringing a goofy, insouciant energy even when the scripts were wonky and uneven, and making Superman’s greatest foe as endearing as he was cunning. Fun aside: The Hollywood Reporter in 2021 chronicled how Hackman and director Richard Donner debated whether the (bald and clean-shaven, in the comics) Luthor should have facial hair. They made a deal: If Hackman got rid of his moustache he grew for the role, Donner would do the same with his own. “True to his word, he celebrated my last razor stroke by gleefully pulling off the fake whiskers he’d acquired for the occasion,” Hackman said, adding, “Dick made it fun, and that’s why the films turned out that way, too.”
Herb Scribner

Hoosiers (1986)

The pleasure is in watching Hackman’s new basketball coach in a small Indiana town ignore his critics and concentrate on passing out pitch-perfect teaching moments. Like the way he leaves four men on the court after calmly telling a player to “sit down” for not passing four times before shooting, or tentatively but firmly pushes Dennis Hopper’s alcoholic to clean himself up and sit by his side as an assistant coach. He’s like a bizarro version of Harold Hill in The Music Man, a sheep in wolf’s clothing whose grumpy benevolence shows the townspeople a new way to care about each other.
Zachary Pincus-Roth

Mississippi Burning (1988)

Hackman plays the more seasoned of two FBI agents (opposite the much younger Willem Dafoe) investigating the disappearances of civil rights activists in the Jim Crow South. It’s classic Hackman – a gruff character with a soft inside. He’s steely when dealing with local law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan, and tender with Frances McDormand, the wife of a rotten deputy sheriff. Hackman’s commanding way of matching his words with actions, no matter how brutal, makes him more than the cliched bad cop who doesn’t play by the rules.
Omari Daniels

Unforgiven (1992)

In Clint Eastwood’s revisionist western, the filmmaker stars as William Munny, a man of extreme violence desperately hoping to leave that life behind. His opposite number is Gene Hackman’s “Little Bill”, a sheriff with no such desire. Hackman’s performance is spellbinding, with the actor smoothly shifting between terrifying physicality, affable storytelling and thundering confidence.

Little Bill greets an outlaw with a savage beating, regales and toys with a visiting writer and wields his power over others through fear, cruelty and bloodshed. By the movie’s climax, with Munny and Little Bill face to face, Hackman’s sheriff bitterly recognises and gives voice to what Munny had fought against: that both men are destined for the same bleak fate. Eastwood later marvelled that Hackman “had the character so perfect right out of the box on every shot, every sequence”. Hackman won his second Oscar for the performance, more than two decades after winning his first for The French Connection.
Mark Berman

The Firm (1993)

Two things always get me to watch cable TV staple The Firm: the tinkle-tinkle bang-bang-bang piano score, and Gene Hackman having a great time as Avery Tolar, a devilish senior partner at a murderous law firm. Tolar takes a young Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) under his wing while shamelessly hitting on his wife, but by the final scenes, the devil turns out to be pretty decent, in a turn that only Hackman could make believable.
Jenny Rogers

The Birdcage (1996)

It would have been easy for Hackman to wither in the shadow of other performances in The Birdcage. Who could possibly compete with Robin Williams voguing across a drag club stage or Nathan Lane at his most adorably histrionic? But even playing the straight man – Senator Keeley, the conservative self-appointed chief of the morality police – Hackman is a constant source of comedy. Watching his character fall a little bit in love with his daughter’s future “mother”-in-law (Lane) is almost as delightful as the movie’s pièce de résistance: Attempting to ghost the paparazzi, he dons a cloud of white hair, false eyelashes and a plunging neckline while awkwardly shimmying to We Are Family.
Stephanie Merry

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

It was the movie that introduced the Wes Anderson aesthetic to the mainstream, and the movie that showed off Gene Hackman’s ability to deliver a line, ride a go-kart and wear a double-breasted suit with wild originality. As the family patriarch in The Royal Tenenbaums, Hackman’s character loomed large in the story, and like Margot Tenenbaum’s bob and fur coat, still looms in our imagination. As ever, no one turned in a quirky line reading like Hackman. “Hell of a damn grave,” he says at one point. “Wish it were mine.”
Jenny Rogers

The Washington Post

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