Legendary Actor Gene Hackman and His Wife Found Dead in Their Home

Gene Hackman, the prolific Oscar-winning actor whose studied portraits ranged from reluctant heroes to conniving villains and made him one of the industry’s most respected and honored performers, has been found dead along with his wife, Betsy Arakawa, at their home. He was 95.

The couple, along with their dog, were discovered in their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on Wednesday afternoon, according to Santa Fe New Mexican.

Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza confirmed the deaths, but he did not release a cause of death, other than to say no foul play is suspected, nor a timeline for when the couple died.

Hackman’s list of films included Oscar-winning roles in “The French Connection” and “Unforgiven,” a breakout performance in “Bonnie and Clyde,” a comic interlude in “Young Frankenstein,” a turn as the comic book villain Lex Luthor in “Superman,” and the title character in Wes Anderson’s 2001 “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

“Gene Hackman a great actor, inspiring and magnificent in his work and complexity,” Coppola said on Instagram. “I mourn his loss, and celebrate his existence and contribution.”

Hackman held special status within Hollywood. He embodied the ethic of doing his job, doing it very well, and letting others worry about his image. The industry seemed to need him more than he needed the industry. Beyond the obligatory appearances at awards ceremonies, he was rarely seen on the social circuit and made no secret of his disdain for the business side of show business.

“Actors tend to be shy people,” he told Film Comment in 1988. “There is perhaps a component of hostility in that shyness, and to reach a point where you don’t deal with others in a hostile or angry way, you choose this medium for yourself.”

He was an early retiree — essentially done, by choice, with movies by his 70s — and a late bloomer. Hackman was in his mid-30s when cast for “Bonnie and Clyde” and past 40 when he won his first Oscar, as the rules-bending New York detective “Popeye” Doyle in the 1971 thriller about tracking down Manhattan drug smugglers, “The French Connection.”

Eugene Alden Hackman was born Jan. 30, 1931, in San Bernardino, California, and grew up in Danville, Illinois. At 16, he “suddenly got the itch to get out.” Lying about his age, he enlisted in the U.S. Marines.

In 1956, Hackman married Fay Maltese, a bank teller he had met at a YMCA dance in New York. They had a son, Christopher, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Leslie, but divorced in the mid-1980s. In 1991 he married Betsy Arakawa, a classical pianist of Japanese descent who was raised in Hawaii.

When not on film locations, Hackman enjoyed painting, stunt flying, stock car racing and deep sea diving. In his latter years, he wrote novels and lived on his ranch in Santa Fe, on a hilltop looking out on the Colorado Rockies, a view he preferred to his films that popped up on television.

“I’ll watch maybe five minutes of it,” he once told Time magazine, “and I’ll get this icky feeling, and I turn the channel.”

The Western Journal has reviewed this Associated Press story and may have altered it prior to publication to ensure that it meets our editorial standards.

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