In August of 1990, members of the entertainment press gathered in Las Vegas to interview the star-studded cast of “Postcards From the Edge,” including Meryl Streep, Shirley MacLaine, Richard Dreyfuss, Gene Hackman and Dennis Quaid, as well as the legendary director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Carrie Fisher, who had adapted her novel of the same name. (We were in Vegas because MacLaine was doing a musical revue at Caesars Palace at the time.)
Gene Hackman was 61 at the time. He had done 11 films in three years, and he told me the heavy workload might have contributed to the heart episode he had experienced earlier that summer.
“I was vacationing in this little seaport town in Oregon when I fest chest pains,” he told me. “So I took a shower and changed my underwear and did all those things your mother tells you to do if you’re going to the hospital… I also put a suit on, because I didn’t want to be in a situation where I’d be in an emergency room and they’d ignore me.
“They told me if I hadn’t come in when I did, I probably would have had a heart attack… I can’t work as much as I want to because I was told to take it easy… I’m not about to retire, but I just can’t do several films one right after another.”
To our great benefit, Mr. Hackman, who has died at the age of 95, went on to create myriad memorable roles after that conversation.
Two years later, he delivered one of the most iconic character performances of all time and won the best supporting actor Oscar for his role as the sadistic Sheriff Bill “Little Bill” Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven.”
That same year, Hackman was Tom Cruise’s mentor in “The Firm,” and in the years to come he would star in films such as “Wyatt Earp,” “The Quick and the Dead,” “Crimson Tide,” “Get Shorty,” “The Birdcage,” “Absolute Power” and “The Royal Tenembaums,” adding to a brilliant career that took of with “Bonnie and Clyde” and continued through films such as “I Never Sang for My Father,” “The Conversation,” “The Poseidon Advenure,” “Superman,” “Under Fire,” “Hoosiers,” “No Way Out” and of course 1971’s “The French Connection,” for which he won best actor.
What a magnificent career. What incredible range.
Like his colleagues Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson and Robert Duvall, among others, Hackman had the Everyman looks of a character and supporting player, but eventually graduated to leading man roles due to the sheer breadth of this talent. Hackman became well-known after playing Buck Barrow, brother of Warren Beatty’s Clyde Barrow, in “Bonnie and Clyde,” in 1967, and reached household-name status after starring in “The French Connection” at age 41 as detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle. As Hackman once told the Los Angeles Times, “Because of ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ quite a few people come up to me, and I’m not the kind of person you come up to — I look so common.”
So true. Hackman, who was 6-foot-2 and enlisted in the Marines when he was 16 in part to escape a rough childhood in downstate Danville, looked like your formidable uncle, or the foreman down at the plant, or the chief of the local fire department. He often played intimidating and unflinching figures, whether it was the undercover narcotics cop in “The French Connection,” the major general in “A Bridge Too Far,” the Secretary of Defense in “No Way Out,” the FBI agent in “Mississippi Burning,” the submarine captain in “Crimson Tide,” the president in “Absolute Power” — but he could lampoon his larger-than-life image in comedic roles, e.g., “Get Shorty” and “The Birdcage.”
As much as I admired Hackman’s award-winning work, my favorite performance of his was in “Hoosiers,” when he so memorably played Norman Dale, the high school basketball coach who was like so many coaches so many of us have known and learned from. Norman was a man who had made mistakes in the past, a sometimes difficult man who could be his own worst enemy — but a good man at heart, a man you’d trust to lead your son.
When I finished my conversation with Hackman all those years ago, we rode an elevator at Caesars Palace together — and on the way down, he told me that he’d like to shake hands now and say goodbye, because once those elevator doors opened, he was going to zip through the casino as quickly as possible, because if he didn’t, people would stop him and want to talk to him as if they knew him, and he’d be stuck. When the doors opened, he was gone. I don’t know if I’d ever seen a man walk so fast.
“I’m just like everybody else,” Hackman had told me in our interview. “I always thought I was indestructible, and I was going to live forever. Now I know better, so I’m going to enjoy all parts of life as much as I can.”