Gene Hackman retired from his long and successful career over 20 years ago, partially forced by health concerns that had him worried for his wife and family.
“I try to take care of myself. I don’t have a lot of fears,” Hackman told Larry King in 2004. “I have the normal fear of passing away – you know, I guess we all think about that, especially when you get to be a certain age.”
He continued, “I want to make sure that my wife and my family are taken care of. Other than that, I don’t have a lot of fears.”
The Oscar-winner and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, were found dead in their Santa Fe, New Mexico, home Wednesday.
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Detectives believe that the circumstances surrounding the death of Hackman and his wife are suspicious enough in nature to require a thorough search and investigation.
Hackman was 95 at the time of his death.
The actor had a close call in 1990 with “severe angina” that required an angioplasty.
He told King in 2004, “I didn’t really know the extent of it at the time, and it happened very quickly. I was in the same day.”
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That same year, his final film, “Welcome to Mooseport,” co-starring Ray Romano, was released, and Hackman retired from the screen.
He had told King that he had nothing lined up, saying with a smile, “It’s probably all over. This is it.”
In a 2008 interview with Reuters, Hackman later confirmed he was done acting.
“I haven’t held a press conference to announce retirement, but, yes, I’m not going to act any longer,” he told the outlet. “I’ve been told not to say that over the last few years in case some real wonderful part comes up, but I really don’t want to do it any longer.”
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He continued, “Yes, I do. I miss the actual acting part of it, as it’s what I did for almost 60 years, and I really loved that. 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 a point where I just didn’t feel like I wanted to do it anymore.”
A year later, he admitted to Empire magazine that his heart health, coupled with stress, was the deciding factor in his stepping away from the screen.
“The straw that broke the camel’s back was actually a stress test that I took in New York,” the “Crimson Tide” star said. “The doctor advised me that my heart wasn’t in the kind of shape that I should be putting it under any stress.”
Hackman admitted in the past that he had financial woes that pushed him to pick some projects he might not have otherwise.
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One of those was “Hoosiers,” the 1986 basketball drama lauded as one of the best sports movies ever made.
“I took the film at a time that I was desperate for money,” Hackman told GQ in 2011. “I took it for all the wrong reasons, and it turned out to be one of those films that stick around.”
“Hoosiers” coincided with Hackman’s divorce from his first wife of thirty years, Faye Maltese, with whom he shared three children: Christopher, Elizabeth, and Leslie.
Hackman opened up about overextending some of his finances in a 1989 interview with The New York Times.
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After winning his Oscar for “The French Connection,” Hackman temporarily retired in 1977, telling the outlet he had been taking roles he didn’t think were all that great in films like “The Poseidon Adventure,” ”Lucky Lady” and ”March or Die.”
”I did the poor-boy thing,” he told the outlet at the time. ”I was very determined to be successful. I had a number of houses and cars and airplanes. It was like the empty barrel that doesn’t have a bottom to it.”
He resumed acting in 1981 and admitted that his career could take its toll on his family.
”You become very selfish as an actor,” Hackman told the New York Times. ”You spend so many years wanting desperately to be recognized as having the talent and then when you’re starting to be offered these parts, it’s very tough to turn anything down. Even though I had a family, I took jobs that would separate us for three or four months at a time. The temptations in that, the money and recognition, it was too much for the poor boy in me. I wasn’t able to handle that.”
Looking back on that low period, Hackman told Cigar Aficionado in 2000 that he was, at one point, millions of dollars in tax debt.
“I used to have to borrow my daughter’s car to go to interviews in Hollywood. Just a piece-of-s–t Toyota and I’d have to park it a couple of blocks [away] and walk so I wouldn’t be seen as being that needy,” he said. “Yeah, I was in trouble in those days. I was six, seven million bucks in debt; I had spent too much and I had a lot of tax shelters that didn’t work. I owed the government four million dollars. I was just barely hanging in, taking pretty much anything that was offered to me and trying to make it work.”
He added, “From the 1970s to the mid-’80s after ‘The French Connection,’ I did four or five films in a row that were not successful commercially, but were thought of as being artistically OK. And then, when they didn’t work, I thought, ‘Well to hell with this, I’ll just do whatever’s given to me. I don’t have to read the script, just tell me how much money they are gonna pay me and I’ll do it.’ So I thought I could get by, and I managed to fake it in many ways.”
Hackman’s career rebounded in the late 1980s with hits and critically acclaimed films, like 1988’s “Mississippi Burning,” which earned him his second Oscar nomination for best actor, and later work like Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven,” for which he took home the best actor award in 1993.
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In 2001, he earned critical acclaim for his role in Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums,” before officially winding down his acting career three years later.
But Hackman remained active in other ways, both professionally and personally.
The “Superman” star would dive and explore shipwrecks and coral reefs with Arakawa, according to a 2001 profile in The Los Angeles Times, and he was also a regular cyclist.
In 2012, Hackman was injured when he was struck by a car while riding a bike in the Florida Keys. Hackman’s rep at the time said the incident was minor, telling E! News, “Gene was airlifted (because he is on an island) to the hospital for routine tests. Everything is fine and Gene is on his way home now with a few bumps and bruises.”
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The incident didn’t diminish his interest in cycling. Six years later, an Instagram post from Santa Fe bike shop Broken Spoke showed the then 88-year-old purchasing an e-bike and posing with an employee.
He also maintained creative interests, writing three historical fiction novels with Daniel Lenihan.
In 2011, he released his first solo novel, an Old West story titled “Playback at Morning Peak,” followed by another novel, “Pursuit,” in 2013.
Speaking to GQ about his legacy, Hackman said he wanted to be remembered “as a decent actor. As someone who tried to portray what was given to them in an honest fashion. I don’t know, beyond that.”
