The Real Reason For Gene Hackman's Sudden Disappearance From The Big Screen

Hackman, an undisputed legend of movies, is regularly cited as one of the finest actors in the history of cinema. He was able to sustain a thriving career across more than half a century, which meant he was a star to several different generations. His acting style was characterized by naturalistic understatement, yet also explosive intensity and charisma. This contradiction was perhaps reflected in Hackman’s struggle with the business side of Hollywood, though.

During the 1970s, Hackman told Gene Siskel something that the famed film critic considered the most telling comment he’d ever heard about the demands of fame. “I was trained to be an actor. I was not trained to be a star,” Hackman explained. “I took lessons in acting, not lessons in how to deal with agents and lawyers and investment advisors or, frankly, with you, the press.”

It was a characteristically honest statement from Hackman, who never minced his words. It wound up being prophetic, too, as this push-pull between acting, celebrity, and the Hollywood machine continuously caused trouble for Hackman in his career. In fact, it may have played a part in his quiet exit stage left in the early 2000s, never to be seen again on screen.

Hackman’s acting origins lay in the early 1950s, when he took a course at the Pasadena Playhouse. One of his peers was none other than Dustin Hoffman. And, incredibly, the future Hollywood legends were voted by their classmates as the students who were “Least Likely to Succeed.” Unsurprisingly, none of those colleagues ever amounted to much in the movie business.

During a 1988 interview with Film Comment magazine, Hackman reasoned that the lack of faith from their classmates was due to the physical appearance of him and Hoffman. “Dustin was thought of as amusing and strange,” Hackman recalled. “He was called a ‘beatnik’ because he wore a leather vest and sandals, which was outrageous then.”

“I’d been in the Marine Corps for five years and was married – an equally unlikely candidate for movie stardom,” Hackman continued. “I think that’s what drew us together. We became very close, and he lived with my wife and me for a while after coming to New York. Neither Dustin nor myself looked like the leading men of that era, especially Dusty because he wasn’t tall.”

Despite landing his debut screen role in Mad Dog Coll in 1961, it would take until 1967 for Hackman to really make his mark. That year he starred as Buck Barrow, the brother of Warren Beatty’s Clyde Barrow, in the classic crime flick Bonnie & Clyde. Hackman’s best supporting actor Oscar nomination was richly deserved.

In 1970 his performance in I Never Sang For My Father earned Hackman a second Oscar nomination. The movie told the story of a college lecturer trying to bond with his estranged dad following the passing of his beloved mom. It was an incredibly personal tale for Hackman, as he’d lived through painfully similar experiences during his own childhood.

When Hackman was only 13 years old, his father walked out on his wife and kids. The young boy even saw him leaving, though his dad didn’t even say goodbye, let alone offer any form of explanation. This abandonment affected Hackman terribly – only three years later he signed up with the Marines. Then, in 1962 tragedy struck when his mother perished in a fire.

In 2011 Hackman told GQ magazine that I Never Sang For My Father holds a special place in his heart. It’s the film that he’d most want to his mother to see, though sadly she never got to see her son on the big screen. He said, “I thought it was a sensitive picture about family and relationships, and I think she would have been proud and happy to see that.”

It would be 1971’s The French Connection, and specifically the role of loose cannon cop “Popeye” Doyle, that then cemented Hackman as a Hollywood leading man. The fiercely intense thriller picked up five Oscars, including best picture and best director for William Friedkin. And Hackman also took home an award on his third nomination – this time for best actor.

In 2009 Hackman told Empire magazine about the research that went into his portrayal of Popeye Doyle. He revealed, “On The French Connection, I had the chance to go to New York about a month before we started shooting and had a chance to drive around with the cops at night through Harlem. You learn a great deal, and there’s a kind of reality there that set in, that I think is valuable to actors.”

One of the most famous images from The French Connection features a seemingly victorious Popeye Doyle waving at his nemesis Charnier. It’s a reference to an earlier moment in which the slippery villain evaded Doyle on a train. But, intriguingly, it was also a gesture that we know played a huge part in Hackman’s life – it was the last thing he saw his father do before leaving his family.

In 2013 Hackman spoke to Vanity Fair about that awful moment. “It was a real adios. It was so precise,” he recalled. “Maybe that’s why I became an actor. I doubt I would have become so sensitive to human behavior if that hadn’t happened to me as a child – if I hadn’t realized how much one small gesture can mean.”

Over the course of the next four decades, Hackman became one of the go-to leading men in Hollywood, while maintaining a character actor’s diversity of parts. His list of excellent movies is extensive: The Conversation, Mississippi Burning, Unforgiven, Hoosiers, Crimson Tide, and Superman: The Movie, to name a select few. And even in his comparatively few duds, Hackman was always the best part of the film.

At times, though, Hackman seemed to struggle with his chosen vocation, even saying in the 1970s that he wished he’s gone into another profession. But in 2011 he told GQ magazine, “Overall I’m pretty satisfied that I made the right choice when I decided to be an actor. I was lucky to find a few things that I could do well as an actor and that I could look at and say, ‘Yeah, that’s alright.’”

Fittingly, Hackman’s personal life has always been as understated as his attitude to his work. He has three children – Christopher, Leslie, and Elizabeth – all of whom came along when he was with his first wife, Fay Maltese. His kids have lived their lives outside the public eye, as has Maltese. In 1991 Hackman married his second wife, Betsy Arakawa, and they’re still together today.

During the 2011 GQ interview, though, Hackman admitted that he had some regrets over his parenting. “I lost touch with my son in terms of advice early on,” he revealed. “Maybe it had to do with being gone so much, doing location films when he was at an age where he needed support and guidance. It was very tough for me to be gone for three months and then come home and start bossing him around.”

Hackman was always able to channel his real-life emotions into his parts, but he excelled with lighter material as well. In 2001 he received rave reviews for his performance in Wes Anderson’s quirky comedy-drama The Royal Tenenbaums. His turn also won him the Golden Globe for best actor in a musical or comedy. The stage was then set for another comedy: the political satire Welcome to Mooseport, which co-starred comedian Ray Romano.

Welcome To Mooseport was released in U.S. cinemas in February 2004. Unfortunately, though, it failed at the box office and was savaged by the press. A few months later, Hackman appeared on Larry King Live for a rare interview. And to the host’s surprise, the star admitted that he didn’t have any further films in the pipeline and, in fact, believed that his time as an actor had come to an end.

It was a super low-key way for someone like Hackman to bow out of the limelight. And, for many years, fans and industry insiders alike weren’t even sure if he’d officially retired or not. But in 2008, while Hackman was promoting his third novel with co-author Daniel Lenihan, a Reuters journalist finally saw an opportunity. They asked Hackman outright whether he was completely done with acting.

“I haven’t held a press conference to announce retirement, but yes, I’m not going to act any longer,” the Hollywood icon revealed. “I’ve been told not to say that over the last few years, in case some really wonderful part comes up. But I really don’t want to do it any longer.” In the end, Hackman’s view on retirement was firm, though he did admit to missing the craft, if not show-business in general.

“I miss the actual acting part of it, as it’s what I did for almost 60 years, and I really loved that,” Hackman revealed. “But the business for me is very stressful. The compromises that you have to make in films are just part of the beast, and it had gotten to the point where I just didn’t feel like I wanted to do it anymore.”

Rather than devoting his time to acting, Hackman seemed perfectly happy to delve into writing instead. As he told Reuters, “I like the loneliness of it, actually. It’s similar in some ways to acting, but it’s more private and I feel like I have more control over what I’m trying to say and do. There’s always a compromise in acting and in film. You work with so many people and everyone has an opinion.”

Many think Hackman took on a new career as a writer when he walked away from acting, but that’s actually a misconception. As we stated earlier, by 2008 he’d already co-written his third novel. His first, Wake of the Perdido Star, was released in 1999, and the follow-up effort Justice For None came out in 2004. So he was already an established novelist when he chose to retire from acting.

In 2009 Hackman spoke to Empire magazine about his career and retirement. He pinpointed what he loved so much about writing his third novel, saying, “It’s very relaxing for me. I don’t picture myself as a great writer, but I really enjoy the process, especially on this book.” But this wasn’t to say that writing didn’t also have its pitfalls.

“We had to do a great deal of research on it to get some of the facts right,” Hackman explained. “And it is stressful to some degree, but it’s a different kind of stress. It’s one you can kind of manage, because you’re sitting there by yourself, as opposed to having 90 people sitting around waiting for you to entertain them!”

Hackman also reiterated that he began dabbling in writing during his acting career. In fact, even though he never managed to write anything that was produced, he did try his hand at turning a couple of novels into screenplays. The first, which he secured the rights to during the 1980s, was the classic thriller The Silence of the Lambs.

Hackman envisioned himself playing Hannibal Lecter but, sadly, he just couldn’t crack the script. He admitted, “I was so respectful of the book that I was into it 100 pages and had about 300 pages of the script! So, I could see that I didn’t have the experience to do that kind of thing at that point, so I let the project go, kind of regretfully.”

An adaptation of Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic would be Hackman’s second crack at screenwriting. It was the real-life tale of an Inuit woman who was the lone survivor of an Arctic exploration crew. “It was kind of a fascinating story in some ways, but I couldn’t quite lick it,” Hackman said. “I couldn’t quite get it to come alive.”

Ultimately, Hackman perhaps needed a collaborator to help him finally shape his ideas into a full story, and he found that in Lenihan. They initially met in the early 1990s during pre-production for The Firm, in which Hackman’s character was a keen scuba diver. The actor was sent to learn with Lenihan, a diver, and marine scientist.

After they got to grips with Hackman’s diving lessons, the two men began chit-chatting about their lives and loves. And once they got on to the topic of the writers they admired such as Ernest Hemingway and Herman Melville, something clicked. They resolved to collaborate on a story, and The Wake of the Perdido Star was eventually born.

For three novels, Hackman and Lenihan formed a potent, if unusual, writing partnership. For instance, their process involved alternating chapters in which each man wrote about a different character. They also realized pretty quickly that, even though they collaborated closely, working in the same room was not a good idea.

In 2008 Hackman told Reuters that while their process involved some intense verbal exchanges, there were never any physical confrontations. Perhaps this passion led to them agreeing not to write in the same place! Either way, there was no doubt that both men valued their partnership. As Lenihan put it, “We each appreciate what the other’s contributing.”

At that point, Hackman told Reuters that he and Lenihan had begun work on another novel, but it had been a struggle. He admitted, “We’ve started a couple. We threw out about 170 pages of a contemporary novel that we were working on. We just got to a point where neither of us was very interested in it.”

At some point following this interview, Hackman and Lenihan decided to give up on that fourth collaboration. Lenihan went off to write his own non-fiction works and Hackman, finally confident enough in his own writing, flew solo. He wrote Western revenge drama Payback at Morning Peak and then published cop thriller Pursuit in 2013. To date, it’s the last Hackman novel to see print.

There was another wrinkle to Hackman’s retirement, though. It took until the 2009 Empire interview for him to reveal health issues also played a part. “The straw that broke the camel’s back was actually a stress test that I took in New York,” he recalled. “The doctor advised me that my heart wasn’t in the kind of shape that I should be putting it under any stress.”

Hackman then chose to settle into the quiet life with Arakawa. He told Empire that he and his wife enjoy watching movies together, specifically “simple stories that some of the little low-budget films manage to produce.” Hackman also took to painting and fishing, and in 2021 film historian James Neibaur revealed that 91-year-old Hackman was still riding his bicycle every day.

Ultimately, there was never going to be a way to tempt Hackman out of his well-earned retirement. He did admit back in 2009 that he believed Hollywood had gotten the message – in fact, he speculated the industry had moved on from him. But in truth, while his self-deprecation was to be expected, we’re not sure the movie business could ever truly move on from someone like Gene Hackman.