Gene Hackman, Hollywood's everyman and 'French Connection' star, found dead at New Mexico home with wife, dog

Gene Hackman, the two-time Oscar-winning everyman of The French Connection, Bonnie and Clyde, Unforgiven, Hoosiers, and many more seminal films, has died. He was 95.

Hackman, his wife of 30 years, Betsy Arakawa, 64, and a dog were found dead on Wednesday in their Santa Fe., N.M., home, according to a statement from the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department obtained by ABC News.

Foul play was not suspected, the statement noted, but an investigation is “active and ongoing.” Authorities said the couple was found during a welfare check after a call from a concerned neighbor.

“I never wanted to be anything but an actor,” Hackman said at the 2003 Golden Globes, where he was presented with the Cecil B. DeMille Award for career achievement. It was his final awards show appearance.

On screen, Hackman could be your coach, your dad, or, as in Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, the unassuming man in the park who was secretly spying on you. Accordingly, Hackman played a good cop in The French Connection and a cruel sheriff in Unforgiven. As Lex Luthor, he menaced the Man of Steel in the Christopher Reeve Superman movies; in Hoosiers, he inspired high-school basketball players from the heartland. He was a heel and a hero all at once in The Royal Tenenbaums.

Hackman didn't fit the part of the traditional leading man. The onetime Marine was balding, doughy and in his late-30s when he was cast as Warren Beatty's brother in Bonnie and Clyde. The movie's electric success changed both Hollywood and Hackman, who went on to earn the first of his five career Academy Award nominations.

Hackman also earned Oscar nods for the family drama I Never Sang for My Father; The French Connection, for which he won Best Actor; the Civil Rights-era detective thriller Mississippi Burning; and Clint Eastwood's unsentimental western Unforgiven, for which he was named Best Supporting Actor.

Other memorable films include the 1970s disaster epic The Poseidon Adventure; the Tom Cruise legal potboiler The Firm; the Will Smith espionage drama Enemy of the State; and the crowd-pleasing comedies The Birdcage and Get Shorty.

Born Jan. 30, 1930, in California, and raised in a small town in Illinois, Hackman roomed with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall when all three were struggling actors in New York.

Hoffman recalled that of the trio, Hackman had the hardest day job. "He worked for the Greenwich Village Moving Company, which means he moved furniture up and down tenements which were six floors," Hoffman told London's Telegraph. "He could put a refrigerator on his back."

None of the three dreamed of becoming Hollywood stars, or, more accurately, none dreamed that Hollywood would let them become stars.

"There were times when I thought I should quit," Hackman told the Associated Press after he finally had a brush with success, "[But] I wasn't qualified for anything."

A brief scene with Beatty in the 1964 big-screen flop Lilith led to Hackman's big break in Bonnie and Clyde, which Beatty produced.

Later, Hackman became Sherwood Schwartz's first choice to play sitcom dad Mike Brady, The Brady Bunch producer would reveal, but the idea never got past network executives.

By the late 1960s, Hackman's movie career was off and running. Over the ensuing decades, the actor worked so often, in so many films, that flops were inevitable, and Hackman, if not Hackman fans, suffered their share.

Ever in demand, Hackman kept right on going up until the mid-2000s. The actor last appeared on the big screen in the 2004 comedy Welcome to Mooseport, with Ray Romano.

In 2008, he was asked by Reuters if he had retired and he said, "I haven't held a press conference to announce retirement, but yes, I'm not going to act any longer. I've been told not to say that over the last few years, in case some real wonderful part comes up, but I really don't want to do it any longer." In 2010, he told the Raleigh News & Observer that he didn't want to "keep pressing" and risk "going out on a real sour note," noting, "I feel comfortable with what I've done.”

Among the projects that failed to coax him back to the screen was Alexander Payne's Nebraska, which ended up with Bruce Dern in the showcase role of a family's cantankerous patriarch in decline.

Asked by Yahoo Entertainment in 2013 if we would see him onscreen again, he quipped: "Only in reruns."

Hackman was married twice, and divorced once. In 2009, Cloris Leachman (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Last Picture Show) wrote of an epic one-night stand she said she had with Hackman in the 1970s.

Off-screen, Hackman painted and wrote historical novels (his final book, Pursuit, was released in 2013), and volunteered at an animal rescue in Santa Fe, N.M., where he lived since the 1980s. He married Arakawa, a classical pianist, in 1991.

One of the last public photos of Hackman and Arakawa was taken one year prior to their deaths, on March 28, 2024. They had lunch in Santa Fe and walked out of the restaurant holding hands.

In the end, Hackman found that while the perks of Hollywood stardom were great, the art of acting remained the thing.

"The only thing I'm in this business for," he said, "is the thrill of making a scene work."