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Gene Hackman: Roles
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Seen back to back to back, Gene Hackman's three leading roles in three current movies offer a clue to his nervy greatness: he seems energised by messing with his directors' expectations. In Wes Anderson's comedy The Royal Tenenbaums, he plays the self-absorbed patriarch of a family of despondent geniuses, and his airy cunning is in dry counterpoint to Anderson's arch, storybook compositions.
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Gene Hackman is one of that rare breed of actor whose star status has been built on talent alone. He may not be the handsomest or sexiest performer in the picture; his romantic roles have been infrequent, and mostly marginal to the plot. But you cannot stop watching him whenever he is on screen, even when the film in which he is appearing is run-of-the-mill. Hackman is an instinctive, intensely physical actor, as much at home playing loud-mouthed bullies and cunningly manipulative bad guys as stalwart or brooding heroes. He is especially adept at expressing himself by modulating his voice and subtly altering his expression, both of which communicate more to the audience than any dialogue. Few actors are more expert at giving ordinary people shadings of psychological complexity, and making larger-than-life characters seem more vulnerable and believable.
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Hackman began performing in several off-Broadway plays. Finally, in 1964, he had an offer to co-star in the play Any Wednesday with actress, Sandy Dennis. This opened the door to film work. His first role was in Lilith, with Warren Beatty in the leading role. Another supporting role, Buck Barrow, in 1967's Bonnie and Clyde, earned him an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor.
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At the end of the 80's, when Hackman had become a deeply respected actor, he alternated roles between leads and minor appearances. In 1990 he underwent surgery because of heart malfunction, of which he recovered satisfactorily, although this kept him away from work for a while. In 1992 he played the sadistic sheriff in Unforgiven, for which role he earned a second Oscar, this time as Best Supporting Actor. After so many years of acting, Hackman wanted to try another field of creativity and wrote his first novel, which was published in 1999, a year in which he exceptionally did not appear in any film.
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After a period of summer stock, Hackman moved to New York where he studied with George Morrison and began getting small parts on television and in stage productions. He won the Clarence Derwent Award for his performance in Irwin Shaw's Children at Their Games, and had his first starring role on Broadway opposite Sandy Dennis in the hit comedy, Any Wednesday.
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[A] thankless role as an ill-fated war correspondent in Roger Spottiswoode's acclaimed 1983 drama Under Fire brought Hackman's career back to life. The follow-up, the action film Uncommon Valor, was ... a hit, and while 1984's Misunderstood stalled, the next year's Twice in a Lifetime was a critical success. By the middle of the decade, Hackman was again as prolific as ever, headlining a pair of 1986 pictures -- the little-seen Power and the sleeper hit Hoosiers -- before returning to the Man of Steel franchise for 1987's Superman 4: The Quest for Peace. No Way Out, in which he co-starred with Kevin Costner, was also a hit. In 1988, Hackman starred in no less than five major releases: Woody Allen's Another Woman, the war drama Bat 21, the comedy Full Moon in Blue Water, the sports tale Split Decisions, and Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning. The last of these, a Civil Rights drama set in 1964, cast him as an FBI agent investigating the disappearance of a group of political activists.
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