Posted on 03/16/2002 4:02:54 PM PST by Pokey78
WHEN Gene Hackman was 13, his father, an Illinois newspaperman, walked out on his family. As he drove off, never to be seen again, he gave a casual, enigmatic wave that Hackman has never forgotten. "It was so precise," he said. "Maybe that's why I became an actor. That one gesture of my father's was all I ever needed to understand about acting."
This week, nearly 60 years later, it's young Gene who's now the unreliable dad, playing Royal Tenenbaum in The Royal Tenenbaums, a man desperate to wheedle his way back into the lives of his wife and children after two decades away.
It's Hackman's 80th film. But don't worry, the 81st will be along any minute - an impressive output for a man who didn't start getting regular screen work until he was 40, even if in half the films he seems to be playing gruff military men and in the other half gruff Defence Secretaries (No Way Out), gruff Senators (The Birdcage) and gruff Presidents (Absolute Power). The ultimate Gene Hackman film would be one on the current war in which he plays the entire gruff Cabinet, gruff Chiefs of Staff and gruff Congress.
Keeping busy has led to him being dubbed (by Variety) "the hardest-working thesp in showbiz" and, less flatteringly, "the American Michael Caine".
But that's an unfair slur. Hackman's the kind of fellow who agrees to do The Poseidon Adventure, the smash disaster movie; Caine's the kind who agrees to do Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, the disastrous disaster-movie sequel.
In the original, Hackman played the priest with the waterproof comb-over who tells all the women that they have to remove their skirts for safety reasons. He did this with a straight face, but he didn't enjoy the film, mainly because of the poufed-up comb-over which he felt made him look like the producer, Irwin Allen, whom he didn't want to look like, having fallen out with him over the script.
If you agree to be in The Poseidon Adventure, it hardly seems worth getting steamed over your hairdo. But Hackman is a moody presence on a movie set: on Poseidon, he didn't want to be reminded of Irwin Allen; on everything since, he hasn't wanted to be reminded of Poseidon.
While shooting The Royal Tenenbaums, Ben Stiller gushed to the old lion that Poseidon had been his favourite film as a kid. "I immediately regretted it," said Stiller, as the room iced up. Hackman hasn't seen most of his 80 movies and isn't planning to.
When Gene was a kid himself, his favourite film was also shipboard - Jack Oakie in Sea Legs, a comedy in which the genial lug got to enjoy the pleasures of travel, chasing girls and a $2 million inheritance. "It seemed like a life," said Hackman, who can't recall when he didn't want to be an actor.
For a boy born in 1930 and raised during the Depression, it was not an uncommon ambition, but Hackman held on to it long after most of his generation had given up. After his dad left, his mom (British) died in a fire, and Gene went to live with his grandmother.
At 16, he served a spell behind bars for stealing candy and soda from a local store and, feeling himself a poor role model for his younger brother and not doing well with the girls at school, lied about his age and got into the Marines.
He served three years, in China, Japan and Korea, spent the next few years drifting around doing stints as a radio announcer and then washed up in California and decided to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. He and his classmate Dustin Hoffman were voted "least likely to succeed" - Hoffman because he was too free-spirited, Hackman because he was already pushing 30.
In New York, the two shared an apartment, Hoffman sleeping on the floor, Hackman working as a doorman at Howard Johnson's diner in Times Square in between the occasional play and the odd episode of television cop shows.
In 1967, Hoffman landed the lead in The Graduate and became a star; Hackman - seven years older than his roommate - got turned down for the role of Mr Robinson. He'd hardly started and already he'd aged a generation.
Three years on, he was offered the role of Dad in The Brady Bunch, the quintessential family sitcom of the Seventies, in which Mike and Carol Brady raise three sons and three daughters in matching tank-tops and bell-bottoms. Had he said yes, Hackman would now be one of those kitsch figures who spend the rest of their lives as a Trivial Pursuits answer.
The actress who played Carol went on to do dinner theatre in Florida, the bland actor who eventually took the part of Mike went on to die of Aids, and, of the six kids, the last seen turned up on television on Wednesday as part of a Celebrity Wrestling extravaganza. His bout with a former member of The Partridge Family served as the warm-up for the skating bad-girl Tonya Harding's slugfest with Clinton's nemesis Paula Jones.
Hackman, aged 40, said no to The Brady Bunch. A year later, he was Popeye Doyle in The French Connection and won the Oscar. He had dodged Mike Brady and become Gene Hackman.
If you didn't know about The Conversation and Night Moves, you can see why they'd want him for a sitcom dad. He's like an old-time movie star - not just Jack Oakie, but Spencer Tracy or Jimmy Cagney - fellows with regular, lived-in faces rather than the gorgeous unblemished sheen of more recent male leads, from Newman to Cruise.
As a young man, Hackman wanted to be Errol Flynn, but any resemblance stops at the moustache. He rarely gets the girl, and if he does she's in trouble - a potential political scandal, an inconvenient corpse.
But, excluded from romantic roles, Hackman has done just about everything else - not with funny accents or make-up, but with the same old moustache and waiter's walk. Go back to his early work, beyond Bonnie and Clyde (1967), to Lilith (1964), in which he has one small scene with Warren Beatty, playing an ostensibly good-natured rustic whose hostility is nevertheless palpable. Hackman's character is the only real person in the picture.
When not filming, he lives quietly in Santa Fe, with his second wife, Betsey Arakawa, a pianist. He goes to the opera, paints still-lifes, writes novels. It doesn't sound very Hackmanesque, but don't worry: last year, in Hollywood, in a "road rage" incident at the corner of Crescent Heights and Sunset, he got into a brawl with two twentysomethings who thought they'd take a pop at him. The ex-Marine landed six blows on the one kid and put him on the ground: they picked the wrong septuagenarian to jump.
That's quintessential Hackman: the everyman veneer, with something explosive lurking underneath. In that sense, his defining role is as the sheriff in Unforgiven, for which he won his second Oscar in 1992. The most memorable scene in this revisionist Western is when Hackman welcomes hired gun Richard Harris to town by kicking him up and down Main Street. So what Stanislavskian or Method technique did this consummate actor use to conjure up such a primal force?
Well, Harris shows up on set and they get to talking, and Hackman realises Harris doesn't remember they've worked together before, on James Michener's Hawaii. So that makes Hackman mildly irked. But then, when the subject comes up, Harris tries to fake his way through it, pretending he does remember. So that makes Hackman really mad. So the cameras start rolling, and he kicks Harris up the street and beats him to a bloody pulp.
You'd be hard put to find a more visceral, driven display of raw violence - unless of course Harris had said, "I simply loved you in The Poseidon Adventure."
When did Mark Steyn start writing for People Magazine?Man. . .I read this and wonder if Steyn is on vacation and has a pitch hitter for the next two
This dude is sooooo funny!
Holy MFS!
I will agree that this one is a little weak by Steyn standards, though. His criticism is usually nearly as witty as his political commentary. For obvious reasons, it's probably harder for him to be funny when he's writing a positive article.
Um, I prefer to be called "White Devil," though "Cracker" is also acceptable.
[S*#t Eatin' Grin]
Mais pour vous, Je suis "Le Diable Blanche!" Seems we're related.
[SEG - eyes shiftin' to 'n fro]
[Actually, I don't know that. I'm just makin' it up.]
Absolument!
You also look like a cartoon character which is pretty cool. Do you know Bart Simpson?
OH
MY
GOSH!
You are so very rouge.
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