Empty Martini Glass

The two-time Oscar winner and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, were found dead in their home.

February 27, 2025

“I like characters that have flaws in them,” said Gene Hackman, who was adept at playing flawed but stalwart men—usually in flawless performances in some 79 movies shot over the course of 40 years. The two-time Oscar winner, whose versatility and reliability made him a welcome addition to any picture, was found dead on Wednesday at age 95, the New York Times writes. The bodies of actor; his wife, classical pianist Betsy Arakawa; and their dog were all discovered in their Santa Fe home. Arakawa was 63.

“We do not believe foul play was a factor in their deaths however, exact cause of death has not been determined at this time,” a statement from the Santa Fe Sheriff’s Office reads, though the Press Association has confirmed that there is an “active investigation” into their deaths.

Eugene Allen Hackman was born on January 30, 1930, in San Bernardino, California. His newspaper-pressman father, Eugene Ezra Hackman, took the family all over the country during the actor’s early years, finally settling them in Danville, Illinois. He abandoned the family when Gene was 13, leaving the boy playing in the street as he departed with no more farewell than a tiny wave of his hand. “It was so precise,” the star told Vanity Fair in 2004. “Maybe that’s why I became an actor. I doubt I would have become so sensitive to human behavior if that hadn’t happened to me as a child—if I hadn’t realized how much one small gesture can mean.”

After some trouble with the law—he spent a night in jail for shoplifting candy and soda—the 16-year-old Hackman lied about his age and enlisted in the Marines. During his four and a half years in uniform, he traveled the world and got his first showbiz gig as an announcer on Armed Forces Radio. After he mustered out, he studied radio technique further on the G.I. Bill in New York; he then pursued TV production in Florida and acting at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. In Pasadena, he made a lifelong friend of fellow student Dustin Hoffman before flunking out. Despite his academic failure, he moved to New York in 1957 to commit himself to acting as a profession. He would spend a decade there as a struggling actor, working odd jobs, and palling around with fellow struggling actors Hoffman (who sometimes slept on Hackman’s kitchen floor) and Robert Duvall.

Hackman’s big break came in 1967 with the role of Buck Barrow, brother of outlaw Clyde (Warren Beatty), in the groundbreaking Bonnie and Clyde. The role earned Hackman the first of his five Oscar nominations. He earned his second when he starred opposite Melvyn Douglas in 1970’s I Never Sang for My Father, a poignant drama about the troubled relationship between a man named Gene and his distant dad, a story that hit close to home for Hackman.

Still, he wasn’t yet a star; in fact, director William Friedkin hired him for The French Connection only because he was available and cheap (at just $25,000). The role of thuggish cop Popeye Doyle proved to be the most iconic of Hackman’s career, winning him his first Oscar and making him an in-demand performer for the rest of his life.

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Indeed, Hackman seemed to seldom turn down roles, freely admitting that he occasionally took work for the money. His body of work alternated between future classics and forgettable films. He was often the best thing in bad movies, from his sole scene in his debut film, 1964’s Lilith (the first time he worked with Beatty), to his radical preacher, raging at God in The Poseidon Adventure (1972), to the cop partnered with a detective with multiple personalities (Dan Aykroyd) in Loose Cannons (1990), to the G-man in the historical travesty Mississippi Burning (1988) who jokes, cajoles, sings, flirts, and finally beats the truth out of a cabal of racist killers of three civil-rights activists. (The latter role won him a fourth Oscar nomination.)

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And then there were the gem roles in cult favorites that deserve to be more widely seen: Prime Cut (1972), where he played a sadistic gangster named Mary Ann; Night Moves (1975), a bleak neo-noir that saw him playing a hapless detective; and Scarecrow (1973), Hackman’s favorite among his own films, where he and Al Pacino play a pair of drifters who dream of opening their own car wash.

Despite his reputation for dramatic intensity, Hackman was also capable of goofy comedy—as the blind hermit in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974); the Hollywood B-movie producer in Get Shorty (1995); the nervous conservative senator in The Birdcage (1996); the wheezing cigarette mogul in Heartbreakers (2001); and even the vain villain Lex Luthor in three of Christopher Reeve’s four Superman movies.

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Besides Buck Barrow, Popeye Doyle, and Lex Luthor, Hackman’s unforgettable roles included Harry Caul, the surveillance expert plunged into a world of paranoia in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974); Norman Dale, the disgraced basketball coach seeking redemption in Hoosiers (1986); Little Bill, another brutal lawman and Hackman’s second Oscar-winning role, in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992); and Royal Tenenbaum, the roguish father who long ago abandoned his wife and children and tries late in life to reconcile with them, in Wes Anderson’s bittersweet comedy The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).

In that role, Hackman channeled not only his father but his own troubled tenure as a father; after all, life on far-flung movie sets had strained his 30-year marriage to former bank secretary Faye Maltese (they split in 1986) and estranged him from his three children.

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Despite all the accolades and the steady work, Hackman grew increasingly disenchanted with both his profession and Hollywood filmmaking over the years. “I’m not even sure I like being an actor,” Friedkin recalled Hackman telling him on the set of The French Connection. “I never thought of it as a real job.” He announced his retirement for the first time in the late 1970s, though old pal Beatty lured him back to the business after three years with a cameo in 1981’s Reds. In 1991, Hackman expressed concern over “the artistic community in Hollywood becoming more and more involved with the corporate world. It feels like the more one becomes involved in that, the less chance we have of creating art. That doesn’t feel right.” After wrapping Royal Tenenbaums, he told Anderson, “I’m finished.” He finally quit acting for good in 2004, after the release of the undistinguished comedy Welcome to Mooseport.

Fittingly, his final movie was a film about a former U.S. president who retires to a small town. In real life, Hackman retired to Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his second wife, Arakawa. Aside from some voice-over work in commercials, he never acted again and spent his time painting and writing novels (including 2011’s Payback at Morning Peak and 2013’s Pursuit).

Nonetheless, he was missed. Journalists kept asking him in vain if fans would ever get to see him on-screen again. “Only in reruns,” he told Yahoo Movies in 2014. In 2011, GQ asked Hackman to sum up his life in a phrase. Ever finding the flawed striver within himself, Hackman replied, “He tried.”

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Gene Hackman, Versatile Screen Icon, Dies at 95