Gene Hackman: The brawling genius of film

Despite being voted ‘Least Likely to Succeed’ by his acting school classmates, Hackman became one of the greatest actors of our age, writes Martin Chilton. Gene Hackman joked that he was “at least seventh choice” to play Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in The French Connection. After years of struggle and misfortune, the role of the gritty New York detective won him an Oscar at the age of 41 – and made him a star.

Hackman, who died this week at the age of 95, had a remarkable career, spanning 85 movies and acclaimed roles in television and on stage. Yet success came only after numerous crushing disappointments. Many aspiring actors would have given up, but tough former marine Hackman said he held on to his conviction that “I wasn’t going to let any f***ers get me down”.

The actor, born Eugene Alden Hackman in San Bernardino, California, in 1930, learnt resilience at just 13. His father walked out on their family for good. “He always went too far, laid it on pretty heavy,” recalled Hackman of his dad, who operated a newspaper printing press and believed in corporal punishment. Things came to a head in 1943, after the family had been forced to relocate to Denville, Illinois, and live with grandparents.

The fateful day Hackman’s father abandoned his family remained forever etched into Hackman’s mind. The actor often talked in later life about the “hurt and disappointment” of the memory of his father waving from the car as he drove past him on the street. “That wave, it was like he was saying, ‘OK, it’s all yours. You’re on your own, kiddo’,” Hackman recalled in The New York Times Magazine 46 years later. He drew on the emotions of that fateful day in his career, quipping that “dysfunctional families have sired a number of pretty good actors”.

As a teenager, part of a single-parent family that moved about a lot, Hackman was frequently in trouble. He rowed with authority figures at Storm Lake High School in Iowa. He even spent a night in jail after stealing candy and a bottle of soda. His most peaceful times were when his movie-loving mother Anna took him to the cinema to watch his beloved James Cagney, a hobby that sowed the seeds of his future ambitions.

Hackman finally left school after a furious row with his basketball coach. After working for a brief spell in a steel mill, he lied about his age so he could join the Marine Corps at 16, “looking for adventure”. He spent four and a half years in the marines – serving in Japan and undergoing missions in China during Mao’s revolutionary years. His proclivity for trouble was not cured by wearing military uniform, however, and he got into trouble for brawling. “I have trouble with direction, because I just have always had trouble with authority,” he told Larry King in 2004. “I was not a good marine. I made corporal once and was promptly busted.”.

Fate intervened just as his battalion was called up to fight in the Korean War. Hackman crashed a motorcycle into a tractor that had no lights, breaking his right leg, right shoulder and left knee and leaving him unfit for active service. After being discharged in 1952, Hackman spent six months studying journalism at the University of Illinois before dropping out. At the age of 22, he made his way to New York to try to be an actor, bolstered by the taste of show business he had sampled as a marine, when he had been a disc jockey and news announcer on Armed Forces Radio Service.

Hackman would later ruefully recall the dark days of his early twenties, scuffling around miserable jobs, and living at the YMCA in New York. He drove trucks, worked as a shop assistant at a drugstore (“customers treated you like crapola”), sold confectionery door to door, worked in an upmarket women’s shoe department (where he would slip expensive shoes to friends in exchange for a few dollars) and hauled furniture up high-rise apartments. The worst job, he said, was the night work at the Chrysler Building, polishing leather furniture.

What Hackman described as the “turning point” of his life came in 1955 when he was a doorman at a Times Square hotel. A marine sergeant who had been his drill instructor happened to walk past, dressed in his full colours. “He never looked at me but muttered, ‘Hackman, you’re a sorry son of a bitch’,” he told David Letterman. Hackman was “so embarrassed” by the way he was earning a living that he redoubled his efforts to make it as an actor.

Things began to change in 1956. On New Year’s Day, he married his girlfriend Fay Maltese, a bank secretary, and she encouraged him to pursue his dreams. They moved back to California, where Hackman enrolled at the Pasadena Playhouse Theatre’s acting school. “I was not considered one of their most promising students,” Hackman recalled drolly in a 1987 interview. He was putting it mildly.

At 26, he was more than five years older than most of his fellow students, whom he regarded as tanned young “walking surfboards”. Hackman, who was 6ft 2in, thought of himself as “big lummox kind of person”, talking self-deprecatingly about having the face of “your everyday mine worker”. His classmates did not rate him. The only person he liked was a small, 19-year-old oddball who strolled around in a suede vest and sandals. The rest of the class were hostile to him, too, calling him a “beatnik”. That friend was Dustin Hoffman.