Whenever Gene Hackman came on screen you relaxed into knowing his role or this part of the film was going to be great. And so it was. The ease and minimalism belied a complexity of presence and feeling that you wondered how he packed it all in onto a pin head of presentation. He was never movie star handsome: but such was the strength of his onscreen persona that you never thought about it. He was attractive through character.
Here he is being interviewed in The Actors Studio

He mostly played nasty male roles where you couldn’t dislike him but rather saw the complexity and humanity of the contradiction of good and bad. He had a fierce intelligence, and anger which you could easily imagine made him ‘difficult’ to work with.

He had something to prove. Constantly told that he would never make an actor: he used these rejections to fuel an intensity that lit up the screen. This feeling of himself against the world never left him.

In The Firm 1:19 he played the seducer managing to turn sleazy into something vulnerable and honourable: then sleazy. He played the cop roles (The French Connection) with a gusto to relieve his primitive rage at the world. He was always yelling and rampaging through protocol intense on the mission at hand. His ease and simplicity in front of the camera was the culmination of hard worn skills worked through & discarded to gain a mastery of his craft.

A mixture of guile, rage, intelligence, and sensitivity – he created a new genre of Hollywood Man: deep, multi dimensional, in an age of macho action heroes.
Gene Hackman 1930-2025

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