![]() Hackman is truly a man of wild contradictions. When you’re down on the ground and you’re nearly 72 years old.” We had this ugly wrestling match on the ground. “He brushed against me and I popped him,” Hackman told the Los Angeles Times. In December 2001, a minor traffic accident in West Hollywood escalated into a fist fight with two men in broad daylight. He was still getting into real-life violent altercations as an old man. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I can use this.’ I just took that disappointment and did this kind of transference.” He won an Oscar for his performance. “I could tell he didn’t remember having worked with me and he tried to fake his way through it,” Hackman told The New York Times in 2001. The pair had appeared together in the 1966 film Hawaii. When asked how he found inspiration for this scene, he said he channelled anger over a snub from Harris. Hackman’s character brutally beats a hired gunman called English Bob, played by Richard Harris. There is a compelling scene in Clint Eastwood’s 1992 western Unforgiven, in which Hackman portrayed the sadistic Sheriff Daggett. “He’s one of the ones who are willing to plunge their arm into the fire as far as it can go,’’ said Penn, who directed Hackman in Bonnie and Clyde and Night Moves (1975). Director Arthur Penn said Hackman was one of the best at exploiting the early pain in his life. He also drew on emotions about the people close to him, admitting that he did so “in a very cold and clinical way”. He would wander around New York, endlessly watching people, absorbing their personalities and mannerisms. In his thirties, Hackman remained obsessive about improving his skills. Hackman’s performance in Bonnie and Clyde, which captured the anger and rebellion of Buck, won him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, although he lost out to Cool Hand Luke’s George Kennedy. A couple of years later, Beatty recommended Hackman for the role of Buck Barrow, elder brother of the outlaw Clyde Barrow. In 1964, the year he appeared in the popular comedy stage show Any Wednesday, Hackman landed a role in Lilith, a movie with Warren Beatty. “He would have a part, and then go back to moving furniture.” Hackman did, however, take on board two fundamental questions Morrison said he should dwell on for every part: “How am I like this person?” and “How am I not like this person?” “Gene never knew whether he was an actor,” Morrison told Vanity Fair in 2013. Back in New York, he began studying twice a week with George Morrison, a graduate of Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, who taught him about “method acting”, relaxation techniques, how to hone his timing and delivery and overcome his insecurities. īeing voted “Least Likely To Succeed” only fuelled Hackman’s determination. Blue Light was axed in 1966 after only one season – the same time Hackman landed his first big film role in Bonnie and Clyde. “And it’s gonna be repeated,” he told Hackman. In 2001, Hackman recalled that after his own acting career had started to take off, he had run into one former classmate who boasted about being in an episode of a TV drama called Blue Light. In later years, he tended to frame these experiences in humorous terms, joking about failing to hear from his old classmates. ![]() Hackman was thrown out of the Playhouse after a year, having been awarded the lowest ever grade given there. The class alumni voted them both “Least Likely to Succeed”. ![]() At the age of 22, he made his way to New York to try to be an actor, bolstered by the taste of show business he had sampled as a marine, when he had been a disc jockey and news announcer on Armed Forces Radio Service. After being discharged in 1952, Hackman spent six months studying journalism at the University of Illinois before dropping out. Hackman crashed a motorcycle into a tractor that had no lights, breaking his right leg, right shoulder and left knee and leaving him unfit for active service. I made corporal once and was promptly busted.”įate intervened just as his battalion was called up to fight in the Korean War. “I have trouble with direction, because I just have always had trouble with authority,” he told Larry King in 2004. His proclivity for trouble was not cured by wearing military uniform, however, and he got into trouble for brawling. He spent four and a half years in the marines – serving in Japan and undergoing missions in China during Mao’s revolutionary years. After working for a brief spell in a steel mill, he lied about his age so he could join the Marine Corps at 16, “looking for adventure”. Hackman finally left school after a furious row with his basketball coach.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |