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Two-time Academy Award-winning actor Gene Hackman has been found dead in his home, aged 95, alongside his wife Betsy Arakawa, 63, and pet dog.
In an affidavit issued Thursday morning, New Mexico authorities now say the situation is “suspicious enough in nature to require a thorough search and investigation.”
Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza told The Santa Fe New Mexican that the couple died around midnight on Thursday (27 February). The sheriff did not speculate on their cause of death, which has not been determined.
Click here for the latest tributes to Gene Hackman
Following his retirement from Hollywood, Hackman was rarely seen in public, though he was last pictured in April 2024 out with his wife around Santa Fe. Two years before that, the star made a rare appearance attending a comedy show in Santa Fe.
Hackman burst onto the scene in Bonnie & Clyde in 1967, earning an Academy Award nomination for his role as the brother of Warren Beatty’s Clyde. From there, Hackman appeared in a string of hits, winning his first Oscar for his role as Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in The French Connection (1971), following that up with Superman (1978), Scarecrow with Al Pacino, and The Poseidon Adventure (1972).
William Friedkin’s The French Connection saw arguably Hackman’s most memorable film role. Besides one viewing “in a post-production company’s facility 50 years ago”, Hackman never watched the film, but did admit in 2021: “The film certainly helped me in my career, and I am grateful for that.”
It was a career-defining moment for Hackman, who starred in 10 films over the next three years. But while his career was soaring, Hackman didn’t stay out of trouble.
A proud Democrat, Hackman found himself on the secret list of then-Republican president Richard Nixon’s political opponents. He also ran into problems with money, recalling in a 2000 interview: “I used to have to borrow my daughter’s car to go to interviews in Hollywood. Just a piece-of-s*** Toyota… I was six, seven million bucks in debt; I had spent too much and I had a lot of tax shelters that didn’t work. I owed the government four million dollars. I was just barely hanging in, taking pretty much anything that was offered to me and trying to make it work.”
After back-to-back heavy dramas, he began to appear in comedies such as Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein in 1974, and played villain Lex Luthor in the Superman films of the Seventies and Eighties. Notable films in the Eighties included Reds (1981), Hoosiers (1986) and No Way Out (1987). He was nominated for another Oscar in 1988 for Mississippi Burning, and won for Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven in 1992. Hackman reunited with Eastwood five years later for the film Absolute Power.
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Hackman’s last acclaimed role was in Wes Anderson’s 2001 The Royal Tenenbaums, in which he played the patriarch of a misfit family opposite Anjelica Huston. He then backed out of Hollywood following the 2003 flop Welcome to Mooseport, becoming a writer of historical fiction and living away from the spotlight.
“It’s very relaxing for me. I don’t picture myself as a great writer, but I really enjoy the process, especially on this book.
“We had to do a great deal of research on it to get some of the facts right, and it is stressful to some degree, but it’s a different kind of stress. It’s one you can kind of manage, because you’re sitting there by yourself, as opposed to having ninety people sitting around waiting for you to entertain them!,” Hackman told Empire in a rare interview in 2000.
Hackman had three children – Christopher, Elizabeth and Leslie – with his first wife, Faye Maltese, with whom he was married from 1956 to 1986. Maltese died in 2017.
