SATURDAY RUBRICS: 3/1/25

GENE HACKMAN

BEFORE GOOGLE

The photo above is of Gene Hackman as a boy. The one below is of him as a Marine. I apologize for not getting this weekend’s SATURDAY RUBRICS up on Saturday but since it is Oscar Sunday, I guess it it rather fitting for this one on Gene Hackman to be the one that is a day late. Although Gene himself wouldn’t have liked my missing a self-imposed deadline - not only because he became a writer after he retired from acting and published several novels, but also because he was the consummate professional even though it was all the fussing over him - the makeup artists and hair stylist and costume folks descending on him and overly fixing what they fix between takes as well as the repeated takes themselves - that he didn’t care for even though they were all a part of successful movie actor’s profession. He just wanted to act and even went through his scripts cutting them up to take out all the stage directions and extraneous parenthetical comments that the screenwriter used to give one a fuller sense of the film to be made. But Hackman had one job to do: act. He left it up to the others, the technicians and artists and crew members, to contribute to that fullness. There was a taciturn purity to his artistry. .

Here is an excerpt from Hackman’s New York Times obituary written by Robert Bervist:

“Eugene Allen Hackman was born in San Bernardino, Calif., on Jan. 30, 1930, and grew up in Danville, Ill. His father, also named Eugene, was a pressman for the local newspaper. His mother, Anna Lyda (Gray) Hackman, was a waitress.

“When young Gene was 13, his father abandoned the family, driving away while his son was out playing in the street. As his father passed by, Mr. Hackman recalled years later, he gave him a wave of the hand.

“‘I hadn’t realized how much one small gesture can mean,” he once said. “Maybe that’s why I became an actor.’”

“Lying about his age, he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1946 and served in China and then in Hawaii and Japan, at one point working as a disc jockey for his unit’s radio station. After his discharge, he studied journalism at the University of Illinois for six months and then went to New York to learn about television production.

“He worked at local stations around the country before deciding to study acting, first in New York and then at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, where Dustin Hoffman was a fellow student. They struck up a lasting friendship, though they did not appear in a film together until 2003, when they were both in ‘Runaway Jury,’ a courtroom drama based on a John Grisham novel.

“Back in New York, Mr. Hackman met and married Faye Maltese, a bank secretary, and began the classic actor’s struggle to survive. ‘I drove a truck, jerked sodas, sold shoes,’ he told an interviewer.

“Eventually he found theater work, first in summer stock and then Off Broadway. In ‘Any Wednesday’ — his third Broadway play, but the first to last more than a few days — he played a young man from Ohio who goes to New York and falls in love with a tycoon’s mistress. The critics applauded, the play was a hit, and Mr. Hackman never had to sell another pair of shoes.”

Above, Sandy Dennis and Hackman in the Broadway production of “Any Wednesday.”

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