Hollywood great Gene Hackman, wife deaths now ‘suspicious’

Prescription pills were found scattered on the bathroom floor and one of the couple’s three dogs was dead at their home in Santa Fe.

Detectives believe the deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife are suspicious enough to warrant further investigation, pointing to prescription pills scattered on a bathroom floor and the puzzling death of one of his three dogs.

The Hollywood actor, 95, and Betsy Arakawa, 64, were found dead in their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, just after midnight on Thursday, according to Adan Mendoza, the Santa Fe county sheriff. The circumstances of the deaths, including that of Hackman’s dog, are “suspicious enough in nature to require a thorough search and investigation”, an affidavit released by the New Mexico authorities said.

It lists the suspicious circumstances surrounding the deaths, including the front of the home being “unsecured and opened”. After that sheriff deputies observed a “healthy dog running loose on the property, another healthy dog near the deceased female, a deceased dog laying 10-15ft from the deceased female in a closet of the bathroom”.

The couple was found at an address on a road where Arakawa owns a home, according to property records. Hackman was found dead near the kitchen and Arakawa was found dead in a bathroom near an open pill bottle, according to court records. Authorities said it appeared both of them may have fallen abruptly.

There were no immediate signs of carbon monoxide poisoning, a gas leak or blunt-force trauma, a detective wrote in a search-warrant affidavit, adding that the front door was open. Authorities discovered a dead German shepherd not far from Arakawa’s body and two dogs that were healthy. A maintenance worker had contacted authorities and said he was last in touch with the couple about two weeks earlier.

According to an affidavit obtained by TMZ, Hackman’s wife was found mummified and bloated when the pair were discovered.

Hackman, a two-time Oscar winner whose more than 80 films included Bonnie and Clyde, The French Connection, Hoosiers, Mississippi Burning and Unforgiven, was known as an actor’s actor, sought out by movie stars and top directors who craved the experience of working with him. With a roughed-up face that defied Hollywood glamour, he helped carve a path for unconventional leading men who in another era might have been pigeonholed as side characters.

Hackman in his Oscar-winning role as ‘Popeye’ Doyle in The French Connection. Picture: Getty Images

His signature role was that of Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, the brutish narcotics police officer in the 1971 thriller The French Connection. Director William Friedkin recalled Hackman’s reluctance to dive into the character’s violence and racism. “I knew I had to get him angry,” the filmmaker said at a 2016 event with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Friedkin said instead of yelling “cut” he would try to get in his star’s head. “I would say, ‘Pal, you better get a day job, you better look for something else because this isn’t working.’ ” The trick worked. Hackman temporarily quit the film, but he went on to win a best actor Oscar for the role.

Hackman sometimes spoke about his father abandoning his family when he was 13 years old. Driving away, he gave his son a casual wave while the boy played in the street. He instantly knew his dad wasn’t coming back. “Maybe that’s why I became an actor,” Hackman told Vanity Fair in 2004. “I doubt I would have become so sensitive to human behaviour if that hadn’t happened to me as a child — if I hadn’t realised how much one small gesture can mean.”

Recounting the story in 2001 on the TV show Inside the Actors Studio, an otherwise restrained Hackman paused to fight back tears. “It’s only been 65 years or so,” he said.

Hackman might never have made Bonnie and Clyde had he not just been quickly fired from The Graduate, where he had been cast as Mr Robinson. Warren Beatty, the star of 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde who had worked with Hackman on the film Lilith several years earlier, helped him land the role of Clyde’s brother Buck Barrow.

“There was a little two-minute scene that he had with me,” Beatty said of Lilith in a 2001 Los Angeles Times interview. “It’s difficult to define that thing that makes acting fun. I felt with him it was just more fun, so that when I did Bonnie and Clyde, I wanted Gene to be in it.”

Hackman in a scene from Hoosiers.

Hackman once said that just before Buck’s death scene, director Arthur Penn whispered a single phrase in his ear: “A bull in a bull ring, wounded.” The image held. Hackman was nominated for a supporting actor Oscar.

Other Oscar nominations came in 1971, for his performance as a man living in the shadow of his ageing parent in I Never Sang for My Father, and in 1989 for his portrayal of an FBI agent investigating the disappearance of civil-rights activists in Mississippi Burning. He won a best supporting actor Oscar for his chilling turn as the sheriff Little Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.

Hackman’s other roles have ranged from a priest in The Poseidon Adventure to a blind man in Young Frankenstein, Lex Luthor in the Superman movies, a high-school basketball coach in Hoosiers, a cheesy movie producer in Get Shorty, a paranoid intelligence expert in Enemy of the State and the estranged father of quirky geniuses in The Royal Tenenbaums.

James Lipton, host of Inside the Actors Studio, once said that when he asked actors who had influenced them the most professionally, Hackman’s name came up more than any other.

Gene Allen Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California, on January 30, 1930. He grew up in Danville, Illinois, a blue-collar town, where his family lived with his grandmother. Hackman’s father, who the actor said would sometimes dole out physical punishment in a little cardboard hideaway the boy made for himself in the basement of their home, operated the printing press for a local paper. When Hackman’s Canadian-born mother, a waitress, took him to the movies to see his favourite actors — including James Cagney and Errol Flynn — he was transported. She told him maybe one day he would appear on the big screen. She died in a house fire in 1962, two years before his first significant movie role.

Hackman with Delroy Lindo in a scene from film Heist.

At 16 years old, Hackman lied about his age and joined the Marines, serving in China while his friends were juniors in high school. After the military, he worked a series of odd jobs, including as a furniture mover and doorman in New York City. In 1956, already in his late 20s and married, he moved to California to take acting classes at the Pasadena Playhouse.

At 6-foot-2 and feeling like a “big lummox kind of person” with the face of “your everyday mine worker” — as he once told Vanity Fair — he didn’t fit in with actors he called “walking surfboards”, He befriended another actor there, an awkward 19-year-old outsider named Dustin Hoffman. The two sometimes banged bongos on the roof of the theatre. Their peers voted them Least Likely to Succeed.

Hackman adopted what would become a lifelong practice of the Stanislavsky Method of acting. He often credited his acting teacher, George Morrison, for the practice of creating a character as well as the breathing exercises before performing that he used over the course of his career.

The actor described resistance in Hollywood to Konstantin Stanislavsky’s techniques.

“A lighting guy came up to me and said, ‘Are you one of those Stanislavsky’s?’ Like I was a bug or something,” he said on Inside the Actors Studio. “You’ve got to be tough and say, ‘This is the way I work.’ ”

After leaving movies in 2004 with the comedy Welcome to Mooseport, where he played a retired US president, Hackman devoted time to writing novels. He married classical pianist Betsy Arakawa in 1991 and is survived by three children with his first wife, Faye Maltese.

The Wall Street Journal