In Memoriam
A great actor who decided to retire after a fantastic career.
I’ll say it—Senator Kevin Keeley was one of Gene Hackman’s toughest roles. For one thing, comedy is hard. Everyone knows that. For another, it took a subtler touch than people realize. He’s got to have layers. A conservative Senator in those days wasn’t quite a conservative Senator now, but there is that “people should live the way I want to” attitude. And underlying that, fear of losing power and fear for his daughter’s happiness and fear, never spoken but always there, that maybe he’s wrong. Maybe his whole worldview is mistaken. Maybe Jewish people, and gay people, and gay Jewish people, are not the enemy.
Hackman was believable in that role because of decades of surly characters. It was where he excelled. He won two Oscars for it. (Even if, okay, I will die on the hill that Jaye Davidson deserved it in ‘92.) He won Best Actor for Popeye Doyle in The French Connection and Best Supporting Actor for Little Bill Daggett in Unforgiven, and neither of those characters are happy men. Little Bill is frankly a sociopath. But if you wanted a certain stripe of surly man, you got yourself Gene Hackman.
If you could. He turned down any number of roles. (He was apparently the first choice for Mike Brady, and what a world.) And, of course, he retired. His last role, for good or ill, was 2004’s Welcome to Mooseport, and for the last two decades, he didn’t work. We’re not used to seeing that in actors. Most of them, the greats anyway, seem to drop dead in harness, often leaving a role half-finished or dying before they are able to see it or some such. Actresses retire more often, but there’s a whole other conversation to have about that.
Then again, Hackman lived a complicated and busy life, and the chance to retire might’ve been a good one. He lied about his age to join the Marines. He had been a student at the Pasadena Playhouse, getting some of the worst grades they’d ever given (along with his roommate, a guy named Dustin Hoffman). He’d loaned his friend Robert Duvall money to get by on after Duvall broke his pelvis. He’d been a struggling actor in LA and New York. His real breakout role, in Bonnie and Clyde, came when he was 37. He was likely of the opinion that he deserved a retirement.
Details on his cause of death have not yet been released, but it’s telling that he, his wife Betsy Arakawa, and their dog were all found dead. Police say there was no foul play, which makes it likely there was a gas leak or something along those lines. It’s sad, but better than other options wherein a couple are both found dead during a wellness check. So okay, it’s not as though we were getting more roles from him, and he was after all 95. But that doesn’t mean we have to be happy about it.
About the writer
Gillian Nelson
Gillian Nelson is a forty-something bipolar woman living in the Pacific Northwest after growing up in Los Angeles County. She and her boyfriend have one son and one daughter, and she gave a child up for adoption. She fills her days by chasing around her kids, watching a lot of movies, and reading. She particularly enjoys pre-Code films, blaxploitation, and live-action Disney movies of the '60s and '70s. She has a Patreon account.
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He might have been my favorite actor. Not in terms of playing that one iconic role the way Chris Reeve or Kevin Conroy or George C. Scott did. More in terms of always giving a great performance, and just being the sort of screen presence that made a movie, any movie, worth a little time. Then is no one else I would say does that for me. He was, as Crow T. Robot put it, good in anything. RIP Gene and Betsy and dog.
A legend! One of those older (relatively) guys who shepherded in the New Hollywood and gave it weight. The Conversation and Night Moves are favorites, and of course who can forget Popeye Doyle.
Night Moves was more referenced than seen for a long time, I think, and it and Hackman turned out to be as great as the hype.
NIGHT MOVES is finally getting a blu-ray release (from Criterion!!) in a couple of months.
I have grown to appreciate that film over the years, not so much for its cinematic qualities (even though the dialogue is impeccably honed to hard boiled perfection without sounding self conscious) but for how effortlessly Hackman captures a slightly weary 70s masculinity, often involved in professions deploying a certain forcefulness, dealing with a psychological weight stemmining of a dimishment of physical prowess and ability, loss of professional associations and codes, and shifts occuring with subtle but accumulative impacts both in their marital relationships and in the culture. My dad was a P.I., and, perhaps because he didn’t choose that line of work as a follow-up to law enforcement, he was able to let a lot of this slide off with a little help from a glass of scotch when he got back from work. I saw a lot of Moseby in his colleagues, though, and like Hackman’s iteration of the hard boiled detective, they seemed a bit addled in negotiating middle age while maintaining an aura of control.
‘how effortlessly Hackman captures a slightly weary 70s masculinity, often involved in professions deploying a certain forcefulness, dealing with a psychological weight stemmining of a dimishment of physical prowess and ability, loss of professional associations and codes, and shifts occuring with subtle but accumulative impacts both in their marital relationships and in the culture.”
This is really well put, especially the contrast in psychological weight vs physical decline. Not personally feeling that at all!
You’ve got me thinking on Hackman in the 90s as a person who is conservative in the sense of wanting to hold onto what he has and fearing the loss that is always coming. He’s great in The Birdcage as you note, but this is in Little Bill too. And it’s in his role in The Firm, a guy who has made too many compromises to go anywhere but down – in the 70s the movie would’ve been about him instead of Cruise. But we have a lot of those too, at least. RIP to a great.
THE FIRM might just be my favorite Hackman role. As you note, he is kind of a 70s character stuck in a film from another era, and it gives an otherwise potboiling airport read a much deeper tone.
One of my all-time favorites, with such an unbelievable gift for grandiosity, ordinariness, and the first eroding away to reveal the second. I’ll second Dave in talking about his role in The Firm: he makes that movie for me (“Whatever it is, they did it a long time ago”). But he was incredible–both iconic and lived-in–in everything, and even assembling a list of his favorite movies would take too long. I’ll settle for throwing in one pitch-perfect comedic beat from Superman, when his Lex Luthor, about to eradicate Hackensack, receives a tearful objection from his lover/secretary: “But Lex, my mother lives in Hackensack!” And Hackman just processes this, looks at his watch, and gives a quick shake of the head that’s one of the most funniest things I’ve ever seen.
Writing up a piece on him was also my first assignment when I was working for Looper, and I’m really glad to have had that excuse to research him. I certainly couldn’t have picked a better way to kick off that stretch of professional life.
It’s not that he wasn’t funny or that he didn’t do comedy. But sometimes he was kind of a stealth comedian. You don’t really except the humorless man in those classic gritty 70s films to have such perfect comic timing.
“Whatever it is, they did it a long time ago” is the other end of “one’s just losing more slowly than the other.” You can lose slow for a long time.