Hollywood is full of little guys who act big; Gene Hackman was a big guy who knew how to be small. When the moment called for it, when he was playing a bullying cop or a football player turned private eye, he could bludgeon you with physicality every bit as much as Sean Connery could, but Connery was always larger-than-life, and Hackman was a genius at playing life-sized. With Connery, the essence of his charisma was that he always seemed two inches taller than anyone else on the screen. When he played a hapless professor, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the effect was giddily comic, because you sensed deep down that Henry Jones could take Indiana, and probably all the Nazis, in a fight. When Hackman played a timid egghead—say, the surveillance expert in The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola’s classic paranoid thriller from 1974—there was nothing funny about it unless Hackman wanted it to be. He knew how to pull back the boundaries of his own presence, like someone turning the dimmer on a light.
People often say that Hackman, who was found dead on Wednesday at the age of 95, was an “everyman” actor. I don’t think that’s quite right, or at least “everyman” seems like a strange word to attach to a bona fide star who could play Lex Luthor, Royal Tenenbaum, and the terrifying Wild West sheriff John Herod as brilliantly as he could play Norman Dale from Hickory High. Hackman didn’t take many everyman parts. He went zanier, or he went darker, or he went more morally ambiguous. For zaniness, there was the overconfident movie producer Harry Zimm in Get Shorty, who tries to act like a mobster and gets his ass kicked for his trouble.
For darkness, there was his Oscar-winning turn as Little Bill Daggett, the brutal lawman in Unforgiven. And for moral ambiguity, there was Avery Tolar, Tom Cruise’s half-fatherly, half-threatening mentor in The Firm, whose every gesture of support conceals a quiet menace. Hackman could certainly be an everyman when required—no one on Earth could have been better in Hoosiers—but unassuming normalcy wasn't his mode. He was a little odd, a little off-center, even as an everyman; he never looked as supremely comfortable on the screen as when he was doing outrageous farce for Mel Brooks.
He was born in 1930, in San Bernardino, California. Money troubles drove the family to Illinois, where his dad ran the printing press for a local newspaper; when Gene was 13, his father walked out and didn’t come back. As a kid, Gene moved around a lot. He was rebellious, usually in trouble; he once spent a night in lockup for stealing a bottle of soda and some candy. At 16 he ran away from home and joined the Marines, lying to the recruiter about his age. He wound up in China, while still a teenager, during the last throes of the Communist revolution, and was later stationed in Japan as a field radio operator. He got discharged after a motorcycle accident, studied journalism for a while, and then—remembering the James Cagney movies his mom had taken him to see when he was a kid—decided he might like acting. How hard could it be, right?
It took him a decade to make it. In the meantime, he crashed out of auditions, struggled to make ends meet, and got thrown out of acting school at the Pasadena Playhouse, where his classmates voted him Least Likely to Succeed. He shared the award with his buddy, a kid called Dustin Hoffman.
Hackman gets called an everyman, I suspect, partly because he didn’t have classic movie star looks, but also because his charisma, as intense as it was, was essentially the opposite of what you normally get from movie stars. He held your attention by contracting, rather than by expanding, his ego. Compare him to Cruise, his costar in The Firm. Cruise is one of the most natural movie stars the world has ever seen, and his charisma is so expansive it’s almost imperial. When he’s onscreen, he’s always striving to be the most of whatever it is he’s being: the most fighter pilot, the most superspy, the most lawyer who knows you ordered the Code Red, the most sports agent, whatever. The role, whatever it is, is like a vast space he has to fill, or like an accelerant poured over the flame of his persona. He’s always projecting Tom Cruise-ness to the outer reaches of the universe.
Hackman, by contrast, drew you in by holding back. Even when he was playing a loudmouth or a bully, he always held something in reserve, and because he was so naturally gifted, this felt like an act of generosity rather than stinginess. He didn’t have to overpower you or cow you into submission, the way Cruise or Jack Nicholson or even Humphrey Bogart might. He had a trick of making room: for you, for the story, for the world outside. There was something almost restful about watching him, because he never approached a movie like it was a battle he needed to win. It sounds strange to say that his fundamental quality as an actor was courtesy, but there was something essentially courteous about the way he watched and listened and modulated himself. Movies breathed more freely, always, when he was in them.
And again, this wasn’t a matter of him being somehow less than a real movie star, or less compelling than other actors. If anything, his approach worked because he was more. He was like a billionaire who didn’t have to throw his money around to seem rich. He didn’t need the metaphorical limousine. He could show up in a Honda Accord and you still knew.
I think this is why Hackman, unlike most stars of his caliber, never seemed to pass his peak. It’s not that he got better as he got older—he was brilliant in 1971, the year he made The French Connection, and he was brilliant in 2001, the year he made The Royal Tenenbaums—but because his style wasn’t self-centered, it was able to deepen over time without growing stale. There’s often something slightly ridiculous about middle-aged movie stars, but there was never anything ridiculous about him. Partly that’s because he was already on the cusp of middle age when he got famous—he was in his late 30s when he got the break that led to a part in Bonnie and Clyde and his first Academy Award nomination, and in his 40s when he played Popeye Doyle and got his first win—but mostly it was because of who he was. Time cuts everyone down to size, which can be disastrous for anyone working to seem larger than life. But when your art is based on shrinking yourself, time can be your ally. Aging becomes a tool you can use, like any other.
You see this especially in Tenenbaums, which, incredibly, is the third-to-last film he ever made. Playing an irascible patriarch who’s faking a terminal illness—and who’s thus unintentionally coming to terms with his own mortality—he’s able to fit himself into the mannered whimsy of Wes Anderson’s worldview while adding his own depths of defiance, experience, and regret. “Hell of a damn grave,” he says at the cemetery in the film’s most famous line. “Wish it were mine.” The more he pretends to be dying, the more alive he seems, and the more alive he seems, the more melancholy the comedy becomes, because he, like everyone else, is going to die.
In the famous scene in the game closet with Ben Stiller, he shows how to make room for another actor, another story, even in the smallest of spaces. And when the moment calls for him to take over the screen, he cranks the dimmer, and suddenly he’s a hundred feet tall.
His career ran for more than 40 years. In all that time, I doubt anyone ever felt less excited to see a movie because he was in it. Hell of a damn life.
