Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa were found dead in their Santa Fe, New Mexico, home on Wednesday, Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza confirmed. A cause of death for the Oscar-winning actor, 95, and his wife, 64, was not revealed but Mendoza said no foul play was suspected.
An investigation into their deaths is ongoing. According to Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Denise Womack-Avila, the couple was found dead at around 1:45 p.m. local time on Wednesday after a neighbor called in a welfare check, per Albuquerque’s KOB4.
Hackman and Arakawa, a classical pianist, married in 1991. Their dog was also found deceased.
An acting giant, Hackman was born in San Bernadino, California, and enlisted in the military at age 16, lying about his age to get in. He served over four years as a field operator in the Marines before pursuing acting in 1956 at the San Bernadino Playhouse alongside another performer who would similarly define cinema acting throughout the second half of the 20th century: Dustin Hoffman.
In the 1960s, Hackman toggled between Broadway and television before earning his first Oscar nomination for “Bonnie and Clyde,” a Best Supporting Actor nod for the role of Buck Barrow. His second came for 1970’s “I Never Sang for My Father,” and he won the Best Actor Oscar for his iconic turn as Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in William Friedkin’s 1971 action-thriller classic “The French Connection.”
Hackman was prolific throughout the 1970s, vacillating between drama (“Scarecrow”), action (“The Poseidon Adventure”) and comedy (“Young Frankenstein”) and solidifying himself as one of the best actors of his generation. Few performers defined the term “command the screen” better than Hackman, even in quiet, introspective roles like Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation,” one of several career-defining turns.
He was a thrilling Lex Luthor in Richard Donner’s “Superman,” an inspiring basketball coach in “Hoosiers” and earned his second Best Actor Oscar nomination for 1988’s “Mississippi Burning.” He kicked off the 1990s with yet another iconic turn in Clint Eastwood’s Western “Unforgiven,” for which he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
Hackman spent the rest of the ’90s going toe-to-toe with then-up-and-coming great actors onscreen: Tom Cruise in “The Firm,” Denzel Washington in “Crimson Tide,” Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Quick and the Dead,” Will Smith in “Enemy of the State.” But one of his best performances was in Mike Nichols’ 1996 comedy “The Birdcage,” in which he played a Republican senator opposite a flamboyantly gay Robin Williams. The film culminates in Hackman dressing in drag.
Notoriously prickly, Hackman reached an entirely new generation with his turn as reluctant patriarch Royal Tenenbaum in Wes Anderson’s 2001 film “The Royal Tenenbaums.” Despite frequently butting heads with Anderson and co-star Anjelica Huston on set, it’s still one of his most beloved roles.
Hackman retired from acting for good after 2004’s comedy flop “Welcome to Mooseport” and lived the rest of his life in quiet solitude in Santa Fe. While many hoped he’d be lured back for one more great film to go out on top, the actor held fast to his decision to walk away from Hollywood.
Nobody was gonna tell Gene Hackman what to do.
