At the Pasadena Playhouse in the 1950s, Gene Hackman and his classmate Dustin Hoffman were reportedly voted the two students least likely to succeed. Hackman went on to win two Oscars and make more than 80 films. On February 26, 2025, he, his wife Betsy Arakawa and one of their dogs were found dead in their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 95. Investigators said Arakawa had died of hantavirus, a rare disease spread by rodents, about a week earlier, and that Hackman, who had advanced Alzheimer’s disease and heart disease, died around February 18.
A late start
Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California, on January 30, 1930, and grew up in Danville, Illinois. He lied about his age to join the Marines at 16, and after his discharge he studied journalism and television production at the University of Illinois before moving to California to train as an actor. He did not get his first significant film role until his thirties, and his supporting performance as Buck Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 brought him his first Oscar nomination.
Popeye Doyle and Little Bill
In 1971 he played the obsessive New York detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in The French Connection and won the Oscar for Best Actor. He followed it with The Conversation, as a surveillance expert destroyed by what he overhears, and with The Poseidon Adventure, Superman, as Lex Luthor, Hoosiers and Mississippi Burning. In 1992 he won his second Oscar, for Best Supporting Actor, as the sheriff Little Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. In 2001 he played the father in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums.
Retirement
After Welcome to Mooseport in 2004, Hackman retired from acting and lived full time in Santa Fe, where he wrote novels, some with the underwater archaeologist Daniel Lenihan. He married Arakawa, a classical pianist, in 1991. The deaths of the couple, found days after they had died, led to weeks of investigation before the cause was explained.
Hackman made his last film at 74 and spent his final two decades writing and living privately in New Mexico, far from the industry that had given him two Oscars.