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Gene Hackman holds the Cecile B. DeMille Award at the 60th Annual Golden Globe Awards on January 19, 2003.
AFP / Hector Mata
Paris, France — Gene Hackman, who has been found dead in his home in New Mexico at the age of 95, was once voted as likely to flop in showbiz but instead went on to enjoy a storied, Oscar-winning career as an everyman actor who mined personal pain to give intense, edgy performances.
Hackman is perhaps best known for his portrayal of the tough and vulgar New York cop Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle in the 1971 crime thriller "The French Connection."
Its five-and-a-half-minute car chase scene — in which Doyle crashes his way through bustling city streets, grunting, grimacing and honking as he pursues a bad guy who has commandeered an elevated train — is the stuff of Tinseltown legend.
Hackman won his first best actor Oscar for that film. He won another golden statuette two decades later for best supporting actor for his portrayal of the brutal small-town sheriff "Little Bill" Daggett in the 1992 western "Unforgiven."
He earned three more Oscar nominations during a five-decade career in which he appeared in 80-odd films.
"He's incapable of bad work," Alan Parker, who directed Hackman in the 1988 civil rights drama "Mississippi Burning," told Film Comment magazine that year.
"Every director has a short list of actors he'd die to work with, and I'll bet Gene's on every one."
Here is a list of the five best films Hackman appeared in:
'French Connection' (1971)
One of the greatest thrillers ever made, Hackman won the best actor Oscar for his obsessive New York Detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle on the trail of international heroin smugglers.
William Friedkin's action-packed yarn never lets up for a second, and its car chase under the elevated Brooklyn subway has gone down in film legend.
'The Conversation' (1974)
The following year, Hackman hit gold again opposite Al Pacino as two drifters in "Scarecrow," winning the Palm d'Or at Cannes. And he hit still greater heights in "The Conversation," playing a paranoid, secretive surveillance expert having a crisis of conscience in Francis Ford Coppola's thriller.
'Mississippi Burning' (1988)
Drawn from the real-life FBI investigation into the disappearance of three civil rights activists in the Deep South in 1964, Hackman plays a former Mississippi sheriff who uses his southern wiles to smoke out the Ku Klux Klan members responsible for their murders.
'The Unforgiven' (1992)
Hackman played the odious Sheriff "Little Bill" Daggett in Clint Eastwood's western, which the Los Angeles Times called the "finest since perhaps John Ford's 'The Searchers' in 1956." Hackman won the best supporting actor Oscar. Eastwood also starred as his nemesis, retired gunslinger Will Munny.
'The Royal Tenenbaums' (2001)
Hackman played the pater familias of an eccentric over-achieving New York family, who has to explain to his grown-up children why he and his wife (Anjelica Huston) are separating. Chaos ensues in Wes Anderson's whimsical black comedy.
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