‘He let us hate him’: Gene Hackman had a rare power – he didn’t need to be liked | David Thomson

The former marine was able to plumb depths of nastiness that set him apart from other ‘hard men’ actors of his generation, such as Robert Duvall and Clint Eastwood. It’s the dog that gets me about Gene Hackman. Decades ago he went off to New Mexico, away from the bright lights of fame. And the dog went with him and his wife. Hackman was a firm man – you might say hard. He had been a marine, and seldom bowed to all the suck-up stuff about being lovable and a movie star. He was 95. Clint Eastwood is 94, Robert Duvall the same. Jack Nicholson is only 87, still the kid.

Dustin Hoffman is 87 too, Robert Redford 88, Warren Beatty 87. Harrison Ford is 82, and he seems older, or worried. We can’t expect these guys to go on for ever, just because they’re geezers, veterans and not forgotten. Not all of those fellows are as hard as Hackman was. None of them could summon up the nastiness he had in Unforgiven or the desperate isolation of Harry Caul in The Conversation. Hackman went off to Santa Fe and stopped working (on movies, anyway), while Eastwood directed a picture last year, Juror #2, which was not bad. I wonder if Eastwood has dogs.

People speak of these guys and their generation as real or tough movie stars. I get the point, and I know it’s meant kindly. But bear in mind that Hackman, Nicholson, Eastwood and the others came of age as an earlier wave was dying off – Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power and Gary Cooper, who was the godfather then. He was only 60, but he had looked anxious for years, and he would have thought of Douglas Fairbanks Jr, John Gilbert and even Rudolph Valentino as the real men.

It’s not just that the generations come and go, and that in time a name such as Power sounds fond or quaint. It’s more that we put a load of affection and expectation on stars and it can wear them out. Hackman’s generation seem like “the right stuff” now, good guys who had come up the hard way and had to struggle for attention. But Philip Kaufman’s wry picture The Right Stuff realises that the stuff can be like a slogan or ice-cream. The best of us understand that real hardness is having your Medicaid slashed in Oklahoma or Kentucky, even if you were befuddled enough to vote for the golden slasher. Hard was the 1930s when you might be a vagrant hitching a ride on the burning prairie, wondering if you’d end up a thief or worse.

We shouldn’t make as much as we do of actors and stars when they are trying to represent us – no matter the money, the wives, the residuals and the magazine covers. The stars who were “men” once know that the new generation has to wrestle with CGI and social media.

There are guys around – such as Brad Pitt, Robert Downey Jr and Ed Harris – who may look like worn rock soon, as well as top actors. Can you anticipate Mel Gibson at 90? That’s only 21 years away, and maybe that’s too long to wait. Most of these fellows still remember their lines, or make them up. They can do an acceptable smile. It’s having to run on camera that finds them out.

Actors playing strong men often fret over their own weakness. That’s how close to us they are, and why Hackman knew, without resentment, that no one quite looked at his character Buck Barrow, in Bonnie and Clyde, when Clyde was played by Warren Beatty.

Hackman was firm enough to have no faith in being likable – and that is rare among movie actors, who can be comically insecure. So in The French Connection he was a rowdy scumbag, as great a danger as the advertised rascals. In Crimson Tide he was a grim tyrant, a threat to the world, someone Denzel Washington had to take down. He let us hate him. And in that role, as Captain Frank Ramsey, even on the submarine, he had a dog.