HACKMAN, Eugene Alden ("Gene")

(b. 30 January 1931 in San Bernardino, California), leading Hollywood character actor who shot to stardom at age thirty-six in a supporting role in the groundbreaking movie Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

Hackman was born in the depths of the Great Depression, and his childhood was disrupted when the family moved from California to Illinois, where his father had the promise of work as a newspaper press operator. Hackman's father, Eugene Ezra Hackman, walked out on Hackman and his mother, Lynda, in 1944, and Hackman himself left home three years later to join the armed services. Just sixteen years old, he lied about his age but was allowed to join the U.S. Marine Corps, where he finished his high school education and served from 1947 to 1952.

While he was a marine, Hackman worked as a newscaster and disc jockey for his unit's radio station, a job that would lead him to study journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign after his discharge. After six months at Urbana, he moved to the School of Radio Technique in New York City and then took jobs as a broadcaster in Florida and Illinois. Hackman eventually enrolled at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, where he studied along-sideDustin Hoffman. The pair were voted "least likely to succeed" by their fellow students. Hackman married Faye Maltese on 1 January 1956. The couple had three children, and divorced in 1985. Hackman married Betsy Arakawa in December 1991.

Hackman's first professional acting roles came soon after his marriage, with an off-Broadway debut in Chaparral in 1958, and a television debut in 1959 in an episode of The United States Steel Hour called "Little Tin God." He did not appear in a movie until Mad Dog Coll in 1961, just short of his thirtieth birthday. Hackman's career since then has been one of extremes. From the high points of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and I Never Sang for My Father (1969), his career sank to such lows as The Split (1968), and Narrow Margin (1990). Hackman has stated that he is uncomfortable when he is not working, and this may be the reason for the variable quality of the films he has chosen. Nevertheless, he is rarely less than a magnetic presence on-screen. His performance in Lilith (1964), so impressed the film's star Warren Beatty that Beatty had him cast as Buck Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Hackman's performance in the groundbreaking gangster movie showed he was capable of outstanding character performances and earned him an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.

Five years into his movie acting career, age thirty-six and still relatively unknown, Hackman suddenly became a star. His edgy, wild performance as Buck Barrow, the brother of the notorious outlaw Clyde Barrow, is impressive in itself, but Bonnie and Clyde also turned out to be one of the most important Hollywood movies of the decade. Arthur Penn's masterpiece won two Academy Awards and helped revive the financially struggling movie studio Warner Bros. Although it is primarily a retelling of the story of a real-life spree of bank robbing and killing that enthralled Americans in the 1930s, the movie is also at the beginning of a tradition of films that take a new look at American history. The characters are quite different in other respects, but the ignorant, often comically malicious Barrow is a worthy precursor to the bigoted Popeye Doyle, Hackman's Oscar-winning role in The French Connection (1971).

Hackman's work often has connected with the mood of the times, and this is especially true of the films he made in the 1960s and early 1970s. In Bonnie and Clyde, the gang members are presented at times almost as young heroes persecuted by ruthless authorities, an attitude resonant of youth culture in 1960s America. Hackman's long and gory death scene encourages sympathy more than a sense of justice having been done. The 1960s theme of rebellious youth reappears in I Never Sang for My Father (1969), in which Hackman plays Gene Garrison, a young man unable to communicate with his father. This role brought him his second Academy Award nomination, but by then he was a regular figure on-screen. Bonnie and Clyde was his fourth movie of 1967, and he appeared in seven more (including the television movie Shadow on the Land) between 1967 and 1970. Some of these performances, such as in Downhill Racer (1969), in which he plays a ski coach, show off his skills to impressive effect.

In the 1960s Hackman carved out a niche for himself as an actor capable of playing bullies, bad guys, as well as troubled, ordinary men. The characters he played fit with the atmosphere of change and disturbance in American life. By the early 1970s, with seventeen movies behind him, Hackman took on the role of Popeye Doyle, the troubled narcotics cop in The French Connection (1971). In many ways the realistically shot, hard-hitting thriller built on the work he had done in the 1960s. Hackman finally won the Academy Award for best actor and became a major star. Since then he has managed to avoid typecasting and too many obvious star vehicles. In The Poseidon Adventure (1972), he cashed in on his status, playing a heroic priest leading passengers to safety while retaining a sense of troubled humanity. In The Conversation (1974), his character Harry Caul faces moral confusion in a timely film about surveillance and paranoia. Hackman also showed a capacity for comic acting in Young Frankenstein (1974), in Superman II (1980), and as the idiotic movie producer Harry Zimm in Get Shorty (1995).

Movies such as Bonnie and Clyde helped revive Hollywood in the 1960s. Hackman's specialty—men whose ambition, unorthodoxy, or outright viciousness get the better of them—became a staple of thrillers in the 1970s and 1980s. Although Hackman may not have been as discriminating with projects as perhaps he should have been, he is one of the finest character actors to have emerged from Hollywood since the 1950s. His performance as Buck Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde helped redefine the movie bad guy for the late twentieth century as someone with ambition and drive but no conventional way of achieving his goals. Hackman's impressive career covers more than forty years and seventy screen appearances, and includes two Academy Awards.

Biographies of Hackman include Allan Hunter, Gene Hackman (1987), and Michael Munn, Gene Hackman (1997). Articles about his career in the 1960s and early 1970s include H. G. Luft, "Gene Hackman: An American of Strength and Doubts," Films in Review (Jan. 1975). Hackman was interviewed by Paul Fischer for Film Monthly (Nov. 2001).

Chris Routledge