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Gene Hackman Remembered: How the ’70s Acting Legend Left His Mark and Shaped ‘The Conversation’

Gene Hackman will be remembered for the Oscar-winning 'French Connection' and 'Unforgiven' as well as 'Scarecrow' and 'The Conversation.'

Over an four-decade screen career, the stage-trained star gravitated to complex movies for grown-up audiences (the only significant exception being his iconic turn as Lex Luthor in the “Superman” franchise), and might have been entirely forgotten by Gen Z, if not for his performance as the gruff patriarch in Wes Anderson’s cult favorite “The Royal Tenenbaums.” Pacino (opposite whose freewheeling drifter he played a supportive pal in “Scarecrow”) and Hoffman (who shared an apartment with Hackman during their early New York years) respected the hell out of a sensitive and thoughtful soul who embodied some of the most ferocious and self-destructively obsessive characters in modern cinema, from Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (the monomaniacal “French Connection” cop who gets hooked on heroin in its even more extreme sequel) to the power-drunk frontier sheriff Little Bill in “ Unforgiven ” (1992). He could elevate a potboiler (like “Absolute Power,” “Extreme Measures” or “Runaway Jury”) by his mere presence, though it’s the work he did in the 1970s that holds up best, where no sign of ego remains as Hackman disappears into the skin of a scruffy human tumbleweed like Max (in “Scarecrow”) or the meat-cleaving Mary Ann (his first great villain, in the bloody, all-but-forgotten slaughterhouse thriller “Prime Cut”).

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