--- title: The Miracle of Gene Hackman description: The French Connection, The Conversation, and The Royal Tenenbaums star, who died at 95, reveled in playing widely varied roles canonical: https://time.com/7262470/gene-hackman-legacy-remembrance/ author: Stephanie Zacharek article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2025-02-27T20:06:37.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-11T04:51:35.356Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: The Miracle of Gene Hackman og:description: The French Connection and The Royal Tenenbaums star, who died at 95, reveled in playing widely varied roles og:url: https://time.com/7262470/gene-hackman-legacy-remembrance/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc4cd765abd60fd58/6998c47607a30d7ad277cc66/GettyImages-166977856.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: The French Connection og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Miracle of Gene Hackman twitter:description: The French Connection and The Royal Tenenbaums star, who died at 95, reveled in playing widely varied roles twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc4cd765abd60fd58/6998c47607a30d7ad277cc66/GettyImages-166977856.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Miracle of Gene Hackman > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account.  by [Stephanie Zacharek](https://time.com/author/stephanie-zacharek/)  ## Stephanie Zacharek Film Critic Feb 27, 2025 8:06 PM UTC  Gene Hackman as Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle in u003cemu003eThe French Connectionu003c/emu003e. Gene Hackman as Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle in u003cemu003eThe French Connectionu003c/emu003e.Courtesy of Getty Images  by [Stephanie Zacharek](https://time.com/author/stephanie-zacharek/)  ## Stephanie Zacharek Film Critic Feb 27, 2025 8:06 PM UTC Actors want nothing more than for us to believe in them. But to watch Gene Hackman, who died on Feb. 26 at age 95, almost always meant wrestling with the creeping feeling that no one or nothing could be trusted. He [gravitated toward characters](https://time.com/archive/6595796/10-questions-for-gene-hackman/) whose core of lies came wrapped in the truth, or the other way around. Either way, no matter what character he was playing, you had to keep an eye on him every millisecond, to detect infinitesimal shifts in tone or feeling, sleight-of-hand elisions, a sly but peppery sense of humor that could hit you like the kickback on a shot of cheap single-malt. Put him in a cheap Santa costume, as a dogged narcotics cop hoofing through scrubby New York City streets in pursuit of a two-bit drug dealer, and you could see and feel his entropic rage busting through the chintzy red velour. That’s just one small example of what Hackman could do. His greatness is the kind you measure in molecules, the building blocks of everything. Though he’d had small roles in movies and on television throughout the early 1960s (he’d been a Marine before that, and had studied journalism and television production on the G.I. Bill), Hackman was 36 before anyone really took notice. In Arthur Penn’s 1967 [_Bonnie and Clyde_](https://time.com/4886236/bonnie-and-clyde-50-history/)_,_ Hackman played Buck Barrow, older brother to Warren Beatty’s Clyde; the performance was robust, nuanced, quietly shattering—Buck’s death scene is a [moment of savage grandeur](https://time.com/collection/100-best-movies/6295280/bonnie-and-clyde-1967/). After that, Hackman worked so steadily—through the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s—that it’s hard to summarize his screen credits in even the most cursory way: In the junky yet compulsively watchable disaster film _The Poseidon Adventure_ (1972), he plays a man of the cloth who challenges God to take his life and spare others (he gets his wish). He was fantastic at comedy, playing a [blowhard conservative senator](https://entertainment.time.com/2010/10/01/top-10-hollywood-remakes/slide/the-birdcage-1996-la-cage-aux-folles-1978/) in _The Birdcage_ (1996), and a cigar-smoking, chaos-inducing blind man in _Young Frankenstein_ (1974). He appeared in westerns (among them _Wyatt Earp, The Quick and the Dead,_ and _Unforgiven,_ for which he won a Supporting Actor Academy Award). He showed the kid, [Tom Cruise](https://time.com/4330095/tom-cruise-best-roles/), how it’s done in Sydney Pollack’s _The Firm_ (1993), and played a Mississippi sheriff-turned-FBI agent in [Alan Parker’s true-life Civil Rights drama](https://time.com/archive/6701317/cinema-the-fire-in-the-south-mississippi-burning/) _Mississippi Burning_ (1988). Younger audiences may know Hackman best for one of his later roles, as the cantankerous, hell-raising patriarch in [Wes Anderson’s _The Royal Tenenbaums_](https://entertainment.time.com/2013/04/08/by-the-numbers-10-memorable-movie-accountants/slide/the-royal-tenenbaums/)(2001): the sight of him crouched on a tiny racecar, virtually cackling with joy as he zooms along a stretch of concrete with his grandchildren, is one of the most delightful visuals of early-2000s cinema. Hackman was great at playing bad guys, too: no one’s chuckle was more unnervingly, thrillingly wicked. He turned Lex Luthor into a wonderfully supercilious dandy in several _Superman_ movies. One of my favorite Hackman villains is the conniving country-boy crime boss Mary Ann in Michael Ritchie’s sublimely caustic satire _Prime Cut_ (1972). Mary Ann runs a heartland meat-packing plant as a coverup for his deeply unsavory human-trafficking business; he has no qualms about chopping up his enemies and stuffing their pulverized remains into sausage casing. He’s a snickering, back-slapping gladhander, so ingratiating he’s repugnant—you can’t tell if no one in his small rural community knows what he’s up to or if _everyone_ knows what he’s up to. Hackman revels in it all: he loved going deep inside his characters, even the seemingly not-very-deep ones, and shaking them down for their secrets, which he'd then spread before us like a wealth of pennies. This was an actor with a marvelous, pliable face, not necessarily movie-star handsome but made up of bits and pieces of star quality: the cleft chin, the ready smile, the slightly doughy nose that somehow made his face look comically regal. He was great-looking; he was average. He won his first Academy Award for his role as single-minded narcotics detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in William Friedkin’s 1971 film _The French Connection._ The movie features one of the [most famous, and greatest, car-chase scenes ever put on film](https://entertainment.time.com/2011/05/05/the-15-greatest-movie-car-chases-of-all-time/slide/the-french-connection-1971/), but the scene’s extraordinary editing aside, Hackman is the human element that makes it sing. There's Popeye, behind the wheel of a car he's grabbed from an ordinary citizen, racing to outrun a subway train clattering along an elevated track. He sideswipes cars and trucks, narrowly avoids barreling into oncoming traffic, swerves to avoid a young woman pushing a baby carriage: there's both fear and ruthlessness in his eyes. Forget the dumb [mating of car and human](https://time.com/6101743/titane-review/) in Julia Ducournau’s _Titane;_ in _The French Connection,_ Hackman and his runaway bride of a vehicle represent a far truer merging of man and machine. He’s not just driving; there’s some unnamable force driving _him,_ filling him with its ferocious, angry power.  Gene Hackman as Harry Caul in u003cemu003eThe Conversationu003c/emu003e. Courtesy of Getty Images Yet Hackman’s greatest performance, and one of the greatest given by any actor of any era, is that of the guilt-ridden surveillance expert Harry Caul in Francis Ford Coppola’s [_The Conversation_](https://entertainment.time.com/2013/06/17/spy-games-10-memorable-surveillance-movies/slide/the-conversation/)(1974). No actor has ever made paranoia so poignant. In the movie’s seductive, unsettling dream sequence, Harry follows a mysterious woman—a version of the woman he’s been trailing in his latest job, played by Cindy Williams—and begins revealing secrets to her that he has shared with no one else. He’s trying to warn her of danger, but she can’t seem to hear him. As she, along with the dream, begins to dissolve into mist, Harry says, “I’m not afraid of death,” and though you think that’s the end of the monologue, a beat later he adds, “I am afraid of murder.” It's the afterthought that says everything. At the end of the film, Harry tries to get on with the pleasures of life—or rather, the pleasure, singular, as he appears to indulge in only one: he unwinds by playing along with jazz records on his tenor sax. But the sounds he spins out can't dissolve the aural ghosts that haunt him. The phone rings. He answers and gets nothing but a dial tone. It rings again, and this time he hears the squeal of tape rewinding, and a voice warning him that _he’s_ now being surveilled. He begins dismantling his apartment, at first systematically and then with increasing violence, in search of a bug he never finds. As a last resort, he busts open a statue of the Virgin Mary, the one knickknack on his shelf that his Catholic reverence had, until that moment, rendered untouchable. In the film’s final shot, he’s playing that horn again, amid the lonely wreckage of his apartment. Harry is a man who listens in because joining in isn’t an option. He’s the perennial outsider, and Hackman makes you feel it, like a cold, whooshing wind that reaches your bones. That’s just one example of the miracle of Gene Hackman. To watch him, in any one of his almost insanely varied roles, often meant sitting there with your jaw hanging in disbelief. _What_ was he doing? _How_ was he doing it? _Why_ am I buying it? Great actors are also great salespeople, and Hackman was the kind of performer who’d have you metaphorically driving off the lot, happily, in a Cadillac you could hardly afford. Yes, you bought it. 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