Gene Hackman knew he wanted to be an actor from the age of ten but some people seemed to think he was wasting his time.
His classmates at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, where Hackman studied acting in his mid-20s, cruelly voted him ‘Least Likely To Succeed’.
Given that he shared the award that year with his lifelong friend, Dustin Hoffman, the sceptics couldn’t have been more wrong.
One of the finest and most versatile film actors of his generation, Hackman embodied the virtue of refusing to take the easy path in Hollywood by allowing oneself to be typecast.
In his case it paid rich dividends as the Everyman actor played both heroes and villains in dramas, thrillers, action films and comedies over a 40-year career in which he admitted his workaholic tendencies came at the expense of his family.
He won a Best Actor Oscar playing hardboiled detective Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle in The French Connection and Best Supporting Actor as brutal sheriff ‘Little’ Bill Daggett in Unforgiven.
But he could switch off the menace to play an eccentric family patriarch in 2001 comedy The Royal Tenenbaums (for which he won a Golden Globe) or ham up the villainy as Lex Luthor in the Superman movies.
In later life, he wrote thriller novels and he had a writer’s knack for spotting great scripts.
The French Connection and another classic Hackman film, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, in which he played a morally-conflicted surveillance expert (the actor considered it his finest work), have been hailed as some of the finest thrillers ever made.
The same is true of Unforgiven among westerns.
The more than 70-film career of the gregarious but loner star was all the more remarkable given he was often a complete nightmare to work with.
His overweening ego, ferocious temper and on-set bust-ups with directors earned him the nickname ‘Vesuvius’.
He claimed he had ‘trouble with direction because I have always had trouble with authority’.
However, such was his huge talent that directors invariably tolerated his rudeness.
According to British director Alan Parker: ‘Every director has a shortlist of actors he’d died to work with, and I’ll bet Gene’s on every one.’
A deeply complicated man, the pugnacious Hackman, a former US Marine, was strangely squeamish about on-screen violence but loved a real-life scrap.
Dustin Hoffman recalled his friend once announcing ‘I gotta go’ and disappearing off to a bar because he ‘had to get in a fight’.
He was still getting into fights in his seventies. In 2001, a 71-year-old Hackman started a fist fight with two men over a minor traffic accident in West Hollywood.
‘He brushed against me and I popped him,’ he recalled. ‘Then the other guy jumped on me. We had this ugly wrestling match on the ground.
‘The police came … I got a couple of good shots in. The guy had me around the neck. That’s the ugly part. When you’re down on the ground and you’re nearly 72 years old.’
Even so, Hackman was hardly one to believe that placid, well-adjusted people necessarily made great actors.
His instinctive rebelliousness, he claimed in a rare 1994 interview, was seeded in a traumatic and unhappy childhood in which his violently disciplinarian father abandoned the family when he was 13 and his alcoholic mother eventually died in a house fire in 1962, reportedly passing out while holding a lit cigarette.
Hackman, who said he frequently exploited the early pain in his life in his acting, once wryly observed that ‘dysfunctional families have sired a number of pretty good actors’.
Born in 1930 in San Bernadino, California, to Eugene, a newspaper printer, and wife Anna, he and brother Richard were repeatedly uprooted as the family moved across Depression era America before settling in Danville, Illinois, with his British-born maternal grandmother.
As a child, he particularly enjoyed his trips to the cinema with his movie-loving mother.
After one of them, she told him she’d love to see his face one day up on the big screen – tragically, she never did although their visits instilled in him a passion to act.
Hackman and his father used to spend their Saturdays together until his father chose a Saturday to walk out on the family.
The 13-year-old had had no idea it was coming. ‘That day, he drove by and waved at me and I knew from that wave that he wasn’t coming back,’ said Hackman. ‘That wave, it was like he was saying, ‘OK, it’s all yours. You’re on your own, kiddo.’
The young Hackman was frequently in trouble, once spending a night in jail after stealing sweets and a fizzy drink.
He left school after a row with his baseball coach and, lying about his age, joined the US Marines aged 16 ‘looking for adventure’.
For the next four years, he served in post-war China and Japan as a field radio operator.
His weakness for brawling got him into trouble to the extent that, after being promoted to corporal, he almost immediately lost his stripes.
Discharged in 1952 after he was injured in a road accident, Hackman moved to New York aged 22.
Keen to act but unwilling to commit to learning the craft, he ended up in a succession of dead-end jobs including shop assistant, lorry driver and furniture mover.
He had what he called a ‘turning point’ in his life in 1955 when, while he was working as a hotel doorman, his former Marines drill sergeant walked past and, without looking at him, muttered, ‘Hackman, you’re a sorry son of a bitch.’
Mortified, he vowed to do whatever it took to become an actor, and after marrying first wife Faye Maltese, a bank secretary, in 1956, they moved to California.
There, he enrolled — aged 26 — at the Pasadena Playhouse Theatre’s acting school.
His only friend there was 19-year-old Hoffman, who wandered around in a suede vest and sandals. Bonding over their mutual dislike of their tanned and blandly good-looking classmates, they would escape to the roof and play bongos.
Thrown out of the acting school after achieving the lowest grades in its history, Hackman returned to New York and, continuing his studies but this time exploring the immersive techniques of ‘method acting’, he tried to break on to Broadway yet still occasionally broke off to go back to his old job moving furniture.
Although a Hollywood superstar, Hackman always considered himself a ‘New York actor’, meaning that — as is traditionally the case with British actors — he’d served his apprenticeship on the stage before moving on screen.
Film actors who had never trod the boards tended to be ‘selfish’ in front of the camera and over-act, he said witheringly.
As he and Hoffman tried to strike it big, they joined forces with another future star, Robert Duvall.
During the days, the trio would hurry between auditions and at night they would drown their sorrows.
As an actor with a face that he described as that of ‘your everyday mine worker’, Hackman initially struggled to make headway in an industry obsessed with classic good looks.
In 1964, he won a small role in Lilith, a film drama with Warren Beatty, and a few years later Beatty offered him the part of his fellow gangster brother in the 1967 screen classic Bonnie and Clyde.
Its director, Arthur Penn, would later observe that Hackman was one of the rare actors who ‘was willing to plunge their arm into the fire as far as it can go’.
The film earned Hackman, by then 37, a nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars but even then he continued to obsessively work on improving his acting skills.
Hackman would walk around Manhattan at night simply observing people, making mental note of their behaviour and mannerisms for future use in his roles.
He did the same with the unhappier aspects of his own life which he used in what he called a ‘very cold and clinical way’.
Although he acted relentlessly, it wasn’t until 1971 that he achieved true stardom with The French Connection.
In true method acting tradition, he prepared for the role by accompanying real drug squad detectives on patrol and even held down a suspect during a bust.
However, he almost ruined it for himself when the ever temperamental actor walked out on the second day of filming and only returned after the intercession of his agent.
Collecting an Oscar for his leading role felt like a dream, he said. ‘I just floated from my seat.’
In 1977, however, he retired from acting. The star who said he always liked to be stretched in his roles complained that he was just coasting in richly-remunerated but untaxing films such as disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and Foreign Legion adventure March or Die (1977).
‘I did the poor-boy thing,’ he later explained. ‘I was very determined to be successful. I had a number of houses and cars and airplanes. It was like the empty barrel that doesn’t have a bottom to it.’
Nowadays, almost every star does a superhero film without batting an artistic eyelid, but for Hackman, playing Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor in the original 1978 action movie was the last straw.
‘It scared me when I accepted the role,’ he told the New York Times in 1989. ‘I walked on the set in London the first day of filming and there was Chris Reeve in this skin-tight blue suit and red cape.
‘I looked at him and thought I had really done the ultimate act and committed suicide.’ Critics actually loved his comedic supervillain and he repeated it in two Superman sequels.
But first he spent four years out of acting, painting Impressionist oils (a hobby he’d taken up in the 1950s) and taking up deep-sea diving, stunt flying and sports car endurance racing.
Money problems helped force him back to Hollywood in 1981. He’d frittered so much away on cars, planes and bad investments that he had to borrow his daughter’s clapped-out old banger to drive to auditions.
Hackman received another body blow in 1982 when his lawyer and closest friend, Norman Garey, shot himself.
Four years later, his marriage — which had produced three children but had been plagued by periodic separations — ended in divorce.
Hackman admitted that like so many successful actors always away filming he had seriously neglected his family.
‘You become very selfish as an actor. You spend so many years wanting desperately to be recognised as having the talent and then when you’re starting to be offered these parts, it’s very tough to turn anything down,’ he said.
‘Even though I had a family, I took jobs that would separate us for three or four months at a time.’
Once asked what advice he’d give his son, he admitted he’d lost touch with him so early on in his life he wouldn’t have known where to start trying to relate to him.
His film career was rather more successful. He won a second Best Actor Oscar nomination for his role as a tough FBI man taking on the Klan in 1988’s Mississippi Burning.
Hackman, the man who supposedly never shied from a punch-up, initially turned down the part of a sadistic sheriff in the 1992 western Unforgiven as his two daughters had told him they didn’t like him making so many violent films.
It took the best efforts of its director and star Clint Eastwood to change his mind.
His last film was the 2004 political comedy Welcome to Mooseport and this time his retirement was permanent.
Hackman later said that he’d given up acting not because he was back making poor films but because, having had heart problems, a doctor had warned him that any more stress could kill him.
He had by then settled down in a two-bedroom house in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his second wife, Betsy Arakawa, who was 32 years younger and who he’d married in 1991.
A naturally private man, he was soon labelled a recluse as he remained out of the public eye for years on end but would be occasionally spotted pedalling around Santa Fe on a bicycle.
Old friend Robert Duvall described him as ‘a tormented guy, always into his own space, his own thing’.
Hackman insisted he never thought of himself as a ‘star’ — that was Warren Beatty, Robert Redford and Brad Pitt, he said.
And, after all, the consummate actor believed that celebrity was ruinous, observing: ‘If you look at yourself as a star you’ve already lost something in the portrayal of any human being…You need to remember you’re not a movie star and that you shouldn’t be too happy.’
‘Vesuvius’ said he’d rather just be remembered as a ‘decent actor’.