Gene Hackman: the death of a Hollywood legend

With a distinctive gravelly voice and magnetic screen presence, Gene Hackman, who has died aged 95, was one of the great film actors of the late 20th century. Yet few have had such an unlikely route to stardom, said The Guardian. His family background was fraught; he had no early contact with showbusiness; and his looks were, at best, "homely" – he joked that he had the face of "your everyday mine worker", and he always looked middle-aged.

He only settled on a career in acting when he was in his 20s, and was in his late 30s by the time he got his breakthrough as the elder brother in "Bonnie and Clyde", in 1967, which garnered him an Oscar nomination. Four years later, he was cast as Popeye Doyle in "The French Connection". It won him the first of his two Oscars, and made him a household name.

An extraordinary gift

For the next three decades, Hackman was one of Hollywood's most respected and prolific character actors. He was in a lot of bad films: for a few years, he admitted, he had worked mainly for money, having run up a large unpaid tax bill. But whether he was the comically villainous Lex Luthor in "Superman" (1978), the world-weary FBI agent in "Mississippi Burning" (1988), or the sadistic sheriff in "Unforgiven" (1992), for which he won his second Oscar, he was rarely less than excellent, said The New York Times. An actor who seemed to inhabit his roles, rather than merely play them, he had an extraordinary gift for making characters believable. As the writer Jeremy McCarter put it: "In his performances, as in life, the good guys aren't always nice guys, and the villains have charm."

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Although often cast as tough guys, Hackman insisted that he was not one himself: he thought of himself as sensitive, and took his acting extremely seriously. But he had, he said, anger in him that he was able to "touch on" to create a sense of danger, which may have been a legacy of his unsettled childhood.

Eugene Hackman was born in California in 1930 and raised in Illinois. His mother was a waitress; his father, a violent man, struggled to find work during the Depression, and abandoned the family when Gene was 13. Years later, Hackman recalled that as his father drove away for the last time, he gave him a wave as he passed, as if to say "OK, it's all yours. You're on your own now, kiddo." "I hadn't realised how much one small gesture can mean," Hackman said. "Maybe that's why I became an actor."

After that, he got into fights, left school early and, aged 16, lied about his age to join the Marine Corps. He served mainly in the Far East. But in 1952, he was invalided out after an accident, and had to find a new career. He briefly studied journalism, then moved into TV production. Finally, encouraged by his wife, Faye Maltese, he decided to pursue a long-held ambition to act, and enrolled at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, where he was far older than most of the cohort, but struck up a lasting friendship with fellow student Dustin Hoffman. Their classmates voted them both "least likely to succeed", and for a time it looked as though they might have been right about Hackman. Returning to New York, he took various dead-end jobs to support his family (he eventually had three children) while trying and failing to get a break in acting.

A relentless worker

Hackman refused, however, to give up, and eventually he was offered a bit part in a play off Broadway. He made his film debut in 1961. In the years after "The French Connection", Hackman found his fame hard to handle; and he was troubled by its impact on his family.

He was also impatient with aspects of the film business: he hated having to have lunch meetings with executives and being fussed over by make-up artists, and detested being given line notes. For years, he worked relentlessly, but at other times he took career breaks to pursue other interests: he flew biplanes; he was an accomplished painter and the co-author of three historical novels.

His later roles ranged from a high-school sports coach in "Hoosiers" to a murderous president in "Absolute Power", and a reclusive surveillance expert in "Enemy of the State" – an action thriller that was, in part, an homage to Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 drama "The Conversation", which had provided Hackman with one of the greatest roles of his career. He made his last film in 2004.

His first marriage had struggled under the pressure of his work and ended in 1986. In 1991, he married Betsy Arakawa, a classical musician. Both were found dead in their home in Santa Fe last week; the cause of their death is as yet unclear. She was 65.