He was born in 1930, in San Bernardino, California. Money troubles drove the family to Illinois, where his dad ran the printing press for a local newspaper; when Gene was 13, his father walked out and didn’t come back. As a kid, Gene moved around a lot. He was rebellious, usually in trouble; he once spent a night in lockup for stealing a bottle of soda and some candy. At 16 he ran away from home and joined the Marines, lying to the recruiter about his age. He wound up in China, while still a teenager, during the last throes of the Communist revolution, and was later stationed in Japan as a field radio operator. He got discharged after a motorcycle accident, studied journalism for a while, and then—remembering the James Cagney movies his mom had taken him to see when he was a kid—decided he might like acting. How hard could it be, right?
It took him a decade to make it. In the meantime, he crashed out of auditions, struggled to make ends meet, and got thrown out of acting school at the Pasadena Playhouse, where his classmates voted him Least Likely to Succeed. He shared the award with his buddy, a kid called Dustin Hoffman.
Hackman gets called an everyman, I suspect, partly because he didn’t have classic movie star looks, but also because his charisma, as intense as it was, was essentially the opposite of what you normally get from movie stars. He held your attention by contracting, rather than by expanding, his ego. Compare him to Cruise, his costar in The Firm. Cruise is one of the most natural movie stars the world has ever seen, and his charisma is so expansive it’s almost imperial. When he’s onscreen, he’s always striving to be the most of whatever it is he’s being: the most fighter pilot, the most superspy, the most lawyer who knows you ordered the Code Red, the most sports agent, whatever. The role, whatever it is, is like a vast space he has to fill, or like an accelerant poured over the flame of his persona. He’s always projecting Tom Cruise-ness to the outer reaches of the universe.
Hackman, by contrast, drew you in by holding back. Even when he was playing a loudmouth or a bully, he always held something in reserve, and because he was so naturally gifted, this felt like an act of generosity rather than stinginess. He didn’t have to overpower you or cow you into submission, the way Cruise or Jack Nicholson or even Humphrey Bogart might. He had a trick of making room: for you, for the story, for the world outside. There was something almost restful about watching him, because he never approached a movie like it was a battle he needed to win.
Read it all.
