Gene Hackman, the prolific Oscar-winning actor whose studied portraits ranged from reluctant heroes to conniving villains and made him one of the industry's most respected and honored performers, was found dead Wednesday afternoon along with his wife Betsy Arakawa at their home outside Santa Fe. Hackman was 95, Arakawa was 63. The couple's dog was also found dead at the scene. Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza said foul play wasn't suspected, reports the Santa Fe New Mexican, but did not give a cause or time of death. Deputies responded to a request for a wellness check Wednesday afternoon and found the couple, notes CNN.
Hackman was a frequent and versatile presence on screen from the 1960s into the 20th century, reports the AP. His dozens of films included the Academy Award favorites The French Connection and Unforgiven, a breakout performance in Bonnie and Clyde, a classic bit of farce in Young Frankenstein, and featured parts in Reds and No Way Out. He seemed capable of any kind of role—whether an uptight buffoon in Birdcage, a college coach finding redemption in the sentimental favorite Hoosiers or a secretive surveillance expert in the Watergate-era release The Conversation.
Although self-effacing and unfashionable, Hackman held special status within Hollywood — heir to Spencer Tracy as an every man, actor's actor, curmudgeon, and reluctant celebrity. He embodied the ethos of doing his job, doing it very well, and letting others worry about his image. Beyond the obligatory appearances at awards ceremonies, he was rarely seen on the social circuit and made no secret of his disdain for the business side of show business. "Actors tend to be shy people," he told Film Comment in 1988. "There is perhaps a component of hostility in that shyness, and to reach a point where you don't deal with others in a hostile or angry way, you choose this medium for yourself."
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He was an early retiree—essentially done, by choice, with movies by his mid-70s—and a late bloomer. Hackman was 35 when cast for Bonnie and Clyde and past 40 when he won his first Oscar, as the rules-bending New York City detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle in the 1971 thriller about tracking down Manhattan drug smugglers, The French Connection. In his latter years, he wrote novels and lived on his ranch in Sante Fe on a hilltop looking out on the Colorado Rockies, a view he preferred to his films that popped up on television. "I'll watch maybe five minutes of it," he once told Time, "and I'll get this icky feeling, and I turn the channel." Hackman is survived by a son, Christopher, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Leslie, with his first wife. He and Arakawa married in 1991. (More Gene Hackman stories.)
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