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.
Hackman would later ruefully recall the dark days of his early twenties, scuffling around miserable jobs, and living at the YMCA in New York.
You’re on your own, kiddo’,” Hackman recalled in The New York Times Magazine 46 years later.
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”.
“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.
