The cinema in mourning. Gene Hackman’s career

With that face he would never have to break through in a cinema dominated by the beautiful and damned like Marlon Brando or by the beautiful and enough as Paul Newman. Instead Gene Hackman conquered Hollywood, hurried successful, imposed that bad face in a long career: 80 films, two Oscars and three nominations. Of himself he said he was a more than star actor; It was certainly one of the greatest of the twentieth century. The perhaps most famous interpretation of Hackman, found dead yesterday in his villa in Santa Fe Oeinte with his wife and dog, is perhaps the tough and vulgar New York policeman Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle in ‘The violent arm of the law’, from 1971. Leading the scene of the 20 -minute and a half minutes car, in which Doyle makes his way through the busy streets of the city. That interpretation earned him his first Oscar.

The second arrived 20 years later, in 1992, for his interpretation of the brutal provincial sheriff ‘Little Bill’ Dagger in ‘The ruthless’. “He is unable to do a bad job,” Alan Parker said after having directed him in 1988 in ‘Mississippi Burning’. “Each director has a short list of actors with whom he would die from the desire to work, and I bet that Gene is all over,” he explained.

Hackman was born in 1930, during the Great Depression, in San Bernardino, Illinois, Midwest. The father left home when he was 13 years old, greeting him with his hand as he left in the car. Hackman then said he understood at that moment that he would never return. Hackman’s mother died in a fire before he affirmed himself as an actor. At the age of 16, lying on age, he enlisters in the marines. The lack of a solid emotional context has weighed on his life, as he himself admitted. “The dysfunctional families have generated a certain number of rather good actors,” he said to the Guardian in 2002

Hackman had come to the acting relatively late. After studying journalism at the University of Illinois, he enrolled in the Pasadena Playhouse in California in the late 1950s. Together with his classmate, a certain Dustin Hoffman were qualified as “the least promising” of the course. The appearance, not exactly corresponding to the stereotype of the beautiful Hollywwod, did not favor it. And he knew it. “I wanted to act, but I had always been convinced that the actors should be beautiful. This is because at times Erol Flynn was my idol. I went out of a theater and I frightened when I looked at myself in the mirror because I didn’t look like Flynn,” he said once.

After the Hackman school returned to New York and began to get noticed in off-Broadway theaters. In 1964, he was writing to Broadway for the comedy “Any Wednesday”, who earned him a small role in the film “Lilith” with Warren Beatty. A few years later, in 1967, Beatty called him for ‘Bonnie and Clyde’. It was the turning point. Hackman got his first Oscar nomination and open his way to celebrities’. A second Oscar nomination Arrival ‘for “I never sang for my father” (1970).

Since then, an endless list of films that have entered the history of cinema. From ‘Frankesin Junior’ to ‘Superman’, public enemy ‘to’ Twilight ‘and dozens of others. “I was trained to be an actor, not a star. I was trained to play roles, not to deal with fame, agents, lawyers and press,” he said. Hackman has collected dozens of awards in his long career, even in the 21st century. The third Golden Globe arrived in 2001 for ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’. In 2008 the decision to leave, even in the face of an inevitable physical decline: “It costs me very emotionally to look at me on the screen”, he said. Hackman has spent the last few years writing and painting in his villa in Santa Fe together with his life partner, the classic pianist Betsy Arakawa, his second wife found dead together with him. From the first, Fay Maltese, married in 1956, had had three children.