Gene Hackman was never, ever bad, whatever the role

Somehow the strange circumstances of the death of Gene Hackman, found dead in his New Mexico home with his wife Betsy and their dog, make the end of one of America’s finest actors all the more poignant. The full details will presumably become clear soon — but whatever happened, it is more important to remember Hackman’s legendary on-screen career than to waste time fixating on his final moments. He was an actor without sentiment, but with enormous amounts of fierce compassion — even when playing villains — and it is those qualities that should be celebrated.

Hackman began his life in the Marine Corps before he became an actor, and many of his best performances have the tough, unbending quality that he developed in the military. Yet when he broke through with his star-making appearance in Bonnie and Clyde he was already thirty-seven, having experienced a lengthy period of frustration with bit parts on television, stage and film alike. However, his big break may have come relatively late, but it gave him a considerable boost, as well as an Oscar nomination. After that point, he barely looked back, until he finally retired in 2004 with the unexceptional comedy Welcome to Mooseport.

The work that he will be remembered for, however, is indelible. Of course his Oscar-winning performance as the misanthropist detective Popeye Doyle in The French Connection — braving cinema’s toughest and most realistic car chase, in the process — is a highlight, as is his villainous, fascinating sheriff “Little Bill” in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, for which he deservedly won an Oscar. Yet his career defies easy categorization. There were the loner roles that he excelled at in the Seventies, whether in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation or Night Moves, and then the authority figures of the Eighties or Nineties. If you wanted to cast an actor of gravitas, depth and menace, Hackman was your first choice, and so everything from The Firm to Crimson Tide benefitted from his magisterial presence on screen. He played presidents, nuclear submarine commanders, congressmen and lawyers, and you never questioned his presence or charisma for a moment.

The surprising thing about Hackman was that he was also extremely funny. Sometimes, this was in simple subversion of his stern persona, as in Mike Nichols’s The Birdcage, in which his conservative politician is eventually compelled to wear drag in order to escape greater embarrassment. Often, though, it was testament to his peerless skills as an actor. He steals the show as a blind hermit in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, heaping ever-greater torment on Peter Boyle’s creature without meaning to (“Cigars!”) but he was also a thoroughly enjoyable Lex Luthor in Richard Donner’s Superman, blending camp and menace and setting a high bar for the character that Kevin Spacey and Jesse Eisenberg were subsequently unable to reach. Perhaps Nicholas Hoult will manage it this summer, but somehow I doubt it.

My own favorite role of Hackman, however, is as the jauntily amoral patriarch Royal Tenenbaum in Wes Anderson’s superlative The Royal Tenenbaums. Surrounded by a brilliant ensemble cast, Hackman not only gets the best lines — addressing his grandchildren in the light of their mother’s death, he solemnly declares, “I’m very sorry for your loss. Your mother was a terribly attractive woman” — but he also makes a character who may have been an irritating douchebag if played by a lesser actor come alive. Hackman and Anderson reportedly fought offscreen, and they never worked together again — and it is tempting to wonder if the experience contributed to Hackman’s subsequent retirement from acting — but the results were extraordinary, creating another indelible character amid a gallery of brilliance.

There are very few actors who were never, ever bad, whatever the role or film. Gene Hackman, over the course of the four decades that he was a screen icon, was one of those. Even the worst picture would be lifted several levels whenever he appeared, and if he was in a classic, then it would become a hundred times better for having him in it. We have grown accustomed to his absence from the screen over the past two decades, but the now-certain knowledge that we will never have another Gene Hackman performance is a hard loss, and will be mourned along with the death of this great American actor.