With his passion for suspense – he not only starred in thrillers but wrote them, too – Gene Hackman might have appreciated the mystery he has left behind with his tragic death.
But perhaps the biggest puzzle of all is how a legendary screen actor, who delighted millions during his long, prolific and much-garlanded career, could have ended his life an all-but-total recluse, hidden away in his sprawling estate outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Grisly reports that the bodies of 95-year-old Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa, a 63-year-old classical pianist, were ‘partially mummified’ reveal the extent to which the couple had reportedly isolated themselves from the outside world in recent years.
Indeed, the pair were last pictured together almost a year ago in March 2024 when Hackman – once a great bear of a man but now looking desperately frail – was seen clinging to her arm for support and grasping a stick in his other hand.
Shockingly, that outing to a local restaurant was believed to have been the first time the couple had been seen out together in over 20 years – since they had attended the 2003 Golden Globes. (And Hackman could hardly have missed that event since he was being honoured with the Cecil B. DeMille Award for his ‘outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment’.)
The actor, who appeared in more than 70 films and won Oscars for his roles in The French Connection and Unforgiven, hadn’t made a movie since the 2004 comedy Welcome to Mooseport – universally panned by critics. In his later years, he would occasionally be seen pedalling his bicycle alone or fishing around Santa Fe. But he mostly remained cocooned inside his estate – once featured in Architectural Digest magazine – located on a secluded hill with spectacular views of the surrounding mountains.
There he and Arakawa, his second wife, worked hard on building and decorating their sprawling mansion, on the site of a smaller house he had bought in 1990.
Nor was Hackman believed to have been particularly close to his three adult children – Christopher, Elizabeth and Leslie – from his first marriage to bank secretary Faye Maltese.
Gene Hackman played Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor in the original 1978 action movie
He won his Best Actor Oscar for playing hard-boiled detective Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle in The French Connection
Gene Hackman and wife Betsy Arakawa in Los Angeles, 1991. The pair were found dead at home
Asked in a 2000 interview what his children were doing with their lives, he replied: ‘Well, that’s a good question. I’m not sure, actually. It’s tough being the son or daughter of a celebrity.’
It was a long time since Hackman had acted. He revealed that he finally stopped because, having had heart problems, a doctor had warned him that any more stress could kill him. But he also admitted that he didn’t want to ‘keep pressing’ for work and risk ‘going out on a real sour note’.
The seclusion of his later years seemed poignant given his enormous success, which had seen him earn an estimated $80million fortune. But, in truth, he never enjoyed the limelight at all.
Very much an actor’s actor who took roles because he found them interesting – and not because they would increase his fame – Hackman was naturally shy.
In 2011, he was asked in a rare interview if he would ever come out of retirement to do another film. ‘If I could do it in my own house, maybe, without them disturbing anything and just one or two people,’ he said.
He certainly loved his house: local architect Stephen Samuelson said Hackman was a ‘deeply involved client, very artistic, very keen on details’.
The couple enjoyed the simple pleasures, Hackman said, watching comedy on TV every Friday night and DVDs rented by Arakawa. ‘We like simple stories that some of the little low-budget films manage to produce,’ he said.
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He also took up painting and writing, authoring three historical fiction novels with undersea archaeologist Daniel Lenihan, as well as two thrillers of his own. But there was never any doubt as to his true calling.
Hackman had wanted to be an actor from the age of ten – though plenty of people told him he was wasting his time.
His classmates at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, where the man born Eugene Allen Hackman studied in his mid-20s, voted him ‘Least Likely To Succeed’. He shared the award that year with lifelong friend Dustin Hoffman.
While he won his Best Actor Oscar for playing hard-boiled detective Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle in The French Connection (and Best Supporting Actor as brutal sheriff ‘Little’ Bill Daggett in Unforgiven) he was an ‘everyman’ performer who could switch off the menace to play an eccentric family patriarch in 2001 comedy The Royal Tenenbaums or ham up the villainy as Lex Luthor in the Superman movies.
The French Connection and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, in which he played a morally-conflicted surveillance expert, have been hailed as two of the finest thrillers ever made. The same is true of Unforgiven among westerns. Yet he was widely known in the industry as a nightmare to work with – with his overweening ego, ferocious temper and on-set bust-ups with directors earning him the nickname ‘Vesuvius’. Hackman claimed he had ‘trouble with direction because I have always had trouble with authority’.
However, such was his talent that directors tended to tolerate his rudeness. British director Alan Parker said: ‘Every director has a shortlist of actors he’d die to work with, and I’ll bet Gene’s on every one.’
A deeply complicated man, the pugnacious Hackman, a former US Marine, was strangely squeamish about on-screen violence but loved a real-life scrap.
Hoffman recalled his friend once announcing ‘I gotta go’ and disappearing off to a bar because he ‘had to get in a fight’.
He was still brawling into his seventies. In 2001, a 71-year-old Hackman started a fist fight with two men over a minor traffic accident in West Hollywood.
The actor, who appeared in more than 70 films and won Oscars for his roles in The French Connection and Unforgiven (pictured), hadn’t made a movie since the 2004 comedy Welcome to Mooseport – universally panned by critics
The French Connection and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (pictured), in which he played a morally-conflicted surveillance expert, have been hailed as two of the finest thrillers ever made
Hackman left school after a row with his baseball coach and, lying about his age, joined the US Marines at 16 ‘looking for adventure’ and served as a radio operator in Asia. His weakness for fighting cost him promotion: after reaching the rank of corporal, he almost immediately lost his stripes.
Discharged in 1952 after he was injured in a road accident, Hackman moved to New York aged 22. Keen to act but initially unwilling to commit to learning the craft, he ended up in several dead-end jobs.
He had what he called a ‘turning point’ in his life in 1955 when, while working as a hotel doorman, his former Marines drill sergeant walked past and, without looking at him, muttered: ‘Hackman, you’re a sorry son of a b****.’ Hackman was mortified.
After marrying Faye Maltese in 1956, they moved to California. At 26, he finally enrolled in acting school, making just one friend, the 19-year-old Hoffman. Bonding over their mutual dislike of their tanned and blandly good-looking classmates, the unlikely pair would escape to the roof and play bongos.
Thrown out of acting school after achieving the lowest grades in its history, Hackman returned to New York and tried to break on to Broadway.
With a face he described as that of ‘your everyday mine worker’, Hackman initially struggled to make headway in an industry obsessed with physical beauty.
In 1964, he won a small role in Lilith, a film with Warren Beatty, and a few years later Beatty offered him the part of his fellow gangster brother in the 1967 screen classic Bonnie And Clyde.
‘He brushed against me and I popped him,’ he recalled. ‘Then the other guy jumped on me. We had this ugly wrestling match on the ground. The police came … I got a couple of good shots in. The guy had me around the neck. That’s the ugly part. When you’re down on the ground and you’re nearly 72 years old.’
His instinctive rebelliousness, he claimed in 1994, lay in a traumatic and unhappy childhood. His violently disciplinarian father abandoned the family when he was 13 and Hackman’s alcoholic mother died in a house fire in 1962, reportedly after passing out holding a lit cigarette.
Born in 1930 in San Bernadino, California, to Eugene Sr, a newspaper printer, and Anna, he and brother
Richard were repeatedly uprooted as the family moved across Depression-era America before settling in Illinois, with his British-born maternal grandmother.
The film earned Hackman, by then 37, a nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars – but even then he continued to obsessively work on improving his skills. He would walk around Manhattan at night simply observing people, mentally noting their behaviour and mannerisms for future use in his roles. He finally achieved true stardom in 1971’s The French Connection but he had almost ruined things when, ever-temperamental, he flounced off set on the second day of filming after feeling slighted, only returning after the intercession of his agent.
In 1977, he complained he was merely coasting in richly-remunerated but untaxing films such as disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and Foreign Legion adventure March Or Die (1977).
‘I did the poor-boy thing,’ he explained. ‘I was very determined to be successful. I had a number of houses and cars and airplanes. It was like the empty barrel that doesn’t have a bottom to it.’
Playing Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor in the original 1978 action movie was the last straw.
‘It scared me when I accepted the role,’ he said years later. ‘I walked on the set in London the first day of filming and there was Chris Reeve in this skin-tight blue suit and red cape. I looked at him and thought I had really done the ultimate act and committed suicide.’ But critics loved his comedic supervillain and he repeated it in two sequels.
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After spending a few years deep-sea diving, stunt-flying and racing sports cars, money problems helped force him back to Hollywood. Hackman frittered away so much on toys and bad investments that he had to borrow his daughter’s clapped-out banger to drive to auditions.
He received another body blow in 1982 when his lawyer and closest friend, Norman Garey, shot himself. Four years later, his marriage – which had produced three children but had been plagued by periodic separations – ended in divorce.
Hackman admitted that like so many successful actors always away filming, he had seriously neglected his family.
‘You become very selfish as an actor. You spend so many years wanting desperately to be recognised as having the talent and then when you’re starting to be offered these parts, it’s very tough to turn anything down,’ he said.
‘Even though I had a family, I took jobs that would separate us for three or four months at a time.’
Old friend Robert Duvall once described him as ‘a tormented guy, always into his own space, his own thing’.
Hackman insisted he never thought of himself as a ‘star’ — a label reserved, he stressed, for the likes of Warren Beatty, Robert Redford and Brad Pitt.
He insisted celebrity was ruinous to acting: ‘If you look at yourself as a star, you’ve already lost something in the portrayal of any human being.’
‘Vesuvius’ said he’d rather just be remembered as a ‘decent actor’ – yet his later years of determined seclusion, and the grim circumstances of his and his wife’s deaths, look set to cast a shadow over his glittering career.