Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman has been found dead in his New Mexico home along with his wife and a dog, according to investigators, who said the couple appeared to have been dead for some time.
Clint Eastwood and Bill Murray were among those who paid tribute to the 95-year-old actor on Thursday. Director Francis Ford Coppola said he was “inspiring and magnificent”.
Hackman’s body was found in one room while his 63-year-old wife, Betsy Arakawa, was found in a bathroom next to a heater, Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office said. There was an open prescription bottle, and pills were scattered on a countertop near Arakawa.
In an affidavit, New Mexico authorities said the situation was “suspicious enough in nature to require a thorough search and investigation”.
However, there was no indication that any of the deceased had been shot or suffered other types of wound.
The local gas company is helping with the investigation, but tests of gas lines in and around the home after the bodies were discovered found no signs of a leak.
According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, Santa Fe county sheriff Adan Mendoza confirmed just after midnight on Thursday (27 February) that the couple had been found dead on Wednesday afternoon. The sheriff did not speculate on their cause of death, which has not yet 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 pictured in April 2024 out with his wife around Santa Fe. Two years before that, the star made a rare appearance when he attended 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, he appeared in a string of hits, winning his first Oscar for his role as Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in The French Connection (1971). Other major releases included Superman (1978), Scarecrow (1973) with Al Pacino, and The Poseidon Adventure (1972).
William Friedkin’s The French Connection provided Hackman with arguably his most memorable film role. Aside from one viewing “in a post-production company’s facility 50 years ago”, Hackman never watched the film, but he did admit in 2021 that it had “certainly helped me in my career, and I am grateful for that”.
It was a career-defining moment for Hackman, who starred in a total of 10 films in the three years that included its release. But while his career was soaring, the actor didn’t stay out of trouble.
A proud Democrat, Hackman found himself on a secret list of the Republican president Richard Nixon’s political opponents. He also ran into problems with money, recalling in an interview in 2000: “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 Best Supporting Actor for his part in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992). Hackman reunited with Eastwood five years later for the film Absolute Power.
Hackman’s last acclaimed role was in Wes Anderson’s 2001 movie The Royal Tenenbaums, in which he played the patriarch of a misfit family opposite Anjelica Huston. He then backed out of Hollywood following the 2004 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,” Hackman told Empire in a rare interview in 2000.
“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 90 people sitting around waiting for you to entertain them!”
Hackman had three children – Christopher, Elizabeth and Leslie – with his first wife, Faye Maltese, whom he was married to from 1956 to 1986. Maltese died in 2017.
“The loss of a great artist, always cause for both mourning and celebration,” Coppola said. “I mourn his loss, and celebrate his existence and contribution.”
Eastwood said Hackman had been “intense and instinctive”, describing him as “a dear friend whom I will miss very much”.
“He was a tough nut,” said Bill Murray, “but he was really good. He was a great one. He was a great actor.”
