To call Gene Hackman the consummate actor undersells him. He was extraordinary. Unable to rely on looks or even an everyman charm, he relied on his chameleonic ability to immerse himself in a remarkable range of characters. He played villains with aplomb, with or without a comedic edge. He summoned gritty integrity as easily as he did a sense of restless, relentless intelligence. He pursued a moral course through the darkest of tunnels. A viewer could never relax when Hackman was on the screen. Very few actors have ever been able to sustain that level of intensity in so many different guises.
He acted not just with his eyes, but his eyelids, his eyebrows, and an effortlessly inventive set of facial muscles. Hackman's cinematic smile was not one to trust, and perhaps as a result, it drew you in. His performances invariably exuded the air of men who knew more than those around him. Smug, overconfident, burdened. Whichever it was, he sold it. What he lacked in stereotypical charisma, he more than made up for in compelling inscrutability. There is no such thing as a simple Hackman performance. No matter the role, he conveyed the inner struggle. And if a character lacked the conscience to have an inner struggle, as was the case of Sherriff Bill Dagget in Clint Eastwood's revisionist Western masterpiece, Unforgiven, he was horrifying.
Unforgiven. Superman. The French Connection. The Conversation. The Royal Tenenbaums. Mississippi Burning. The Poseidon Adventure. Crimson Tide. And for me, if perhaps not others, Enemy of the State. But there are so many more. In each of them, Hackman redefined cinematic masculinity, imbuing tenacity with, varyingly, everything from cruelty to vulnerability. He understood the dynamics of power and always ensured that his characters remained deeply imbedded in that paradigm. In that sense, he was one of the most 'real' actors that there's ever been.
It's very saddening that he appears to have passed away in strange and unsettling circumstances, but this cannot be allowed to detract from his legacy as one of the finest actors of his generation. Hackman was a giant, but never larger than life. He was exactly the size required for the slice of life he was given to embody. He didn't particularly like Hollywood. He wasn't a movie star.
He was, quite simply, an actor.
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