Gene Hackman has died today at 95. As the tributes flood in, it’s clear Hackman’s legacy as an actor is a huge one. He was long recognised as a formidable legend in the business, not your average leading man but a powerful character actor who emerged, alongside his former flatmates Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall, in the post-Brando generation of Hollywood ‘Brats’ in the 70s. He went on to have one of the greatest film careers ever, with the ability to elevate even trashy fare into excellence.
Here are his 10 greatest on-screen roles:. Underrated Sam Raimi B-Western about a female gunslinger heading into a small town for a dueling contest. It’s quite silly but has a great cast led by Sharon Stone and Russell Crowe, and featuring a 21 year-old Leonardo DiCaprio as The Kid. Hackman plays the bad guy, an aging gunslinger called Herod, and basically rules the film, as an utter bastard.
Ah his Lex Luthor was a fine creation, a puckish provocateur opposite Christopher Reeve’s serious and straight-laced Superman. Hackman plays Luthor like an opportunistic hustler rather than a criminal mastermind, a super-smart prankster who likes to mess with Superman, rather than be his nemesis.
Brilliant - if highly controversial - Alan Parker thriller in which Hackman and Willem Defoe play two FBI agents who investigate the murder of three civil rights protestors in Mississippi and take on the Ku Klux Klan. Hackman once again steals the film as the heroically tough Anderson, although the ‘white saviour’ narrative was criticised by the likes of Spike Lee.
Late period Hackman, firmly in grumpy old boot mode as Mr Royal Tenenbaum but with significant flair due to this being Wes Anderson world. “I don’t think you’re an asshole, Royal,” Danny Glover’s character Henry Sherman tells him, “I just think you’re kind of a son of a bitch.”.
Apparently Hackman was actually not much easier to deal with on set. He reportedly called Anderson a “c*nt” on-set and Bill Murray started turning up on his days off to shield the director from Hackman. Anjelica Huston also said she overheard Hackman saying to Anderson: “pull up your pants and act like a man.”.
Good performance though, he won a Golden Globe for it. Director Barry Sonnenfeld said Hackman, "was scary as hell to work with – he's very intimidating and suffers no fools." But this is an excellent performance as B-movie producer Harry Zimm, fully showing Hackman’s comedic gifts as the hapless klutz suffering one indignity after another, in contrast to John Travolta’s super-cool gangster/wannabe producer Chili Palmer.
Hackman won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as corrupt Sherriff “Little” Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s none-more-grizzled Western. This is the ultimate anti-Western, a take-down of gunslinging glamour in favour of brutal killing and ugly behaviour. Hackman’s Daggett lures Eastwood’s former killer Will Munny out of retirement to take on the Sherriff and his violent reign of terror over the town of Big Whiskey. This is about the impossibility of escaping your past and Hackman excels as a man who wields false morality like an axe while steeping others in his evil.
Top quality Sunday afternoon viewing, surely the greatest of the 70s disaster movies where an ensemble of stars are knocked off over the course of several blockbuster hours; in this case, the story of the doomed final voyage of luxury cruise liner, the SS Poseidon. This is a far superior film to Titanic in every conceivable way, as the ship is overturned and passengers, including Ernest Borgnine, Shelley Winters and Roddy McDowell attempt to escape. Leading them is Hackman’s Reverend Frank Scott, a gritty man of the cloth who’s mission is to rescue as many as he can from this watery - and fiery - hell.
Gripping Francis Ford Coppola film that was out the same year at The Godfather II and gave him two Best Director nominations. He won for the latter but The Conversation is no slouch, even though it is as slow-paced a thriller as you’ll see. Hackman plays against type as quiet nerd loner Harry Caul, who is a surveillance expert in San Francisco who is hired by a mysterious authority to record a couple walking in the park. What follows is a masterpiece of pre-Watergate tale of paranoia and technology, centred around Hackman’s carefully controlled character slowly coming apart at the seams.
Sequel to the mega-hit original, this has Hackman’s ‘Popeye’ Doyle heading to Marseille in search of drug kingpin Alain Charnier. The film is an excellent sequel, most notable for Hackman’s performance in scenes where Doyle is captured by Charnier and injected with heroin as he’s interrogated. Doyle’s resultant addiction and enforced cold turkey in a prison cell is a lesson in full-on megawatt acting.
William Friedkin’s unbeatable 70s thriller still packs a punch today. This is street film-making par excellence, a stripped back cop thriller in which ‘Popeye’ Doyle and ‘Cloudy’ Russo (Roy Scheider) go on the trail of French drug dealers in New York. Shot on the hoof around the city - including its legendary car chase scene, which only adds to its singular terror - the film is unthinkable without Hackman’s ultra-real performance, which is by turns charming, repellant, loveable and abhorrent. Hackman proved himself the master of naturalistic acting and its rarely been bettered.
