Gene Hackman
Movie Actor — born 1930
Gene Hackman is a retired American actor and novelist.
Gene Hackman is an American Hall of Fame former actor whose five-decade career produced multiple defining American film roles — particularly his two Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor Academy Awards (1972 Best Actor for The French Connection; 1993 Best Supporting Actor for Unforgiven). He was born Eugene Allen Hackman on January 30, 1930, in San Bernardino, California. His father Eugene Ezra Hackman was an American newspaper-printing-press operator (who abandoned the family in 1943 when Gene was 13), and his mother Anna Lyda Elizabeth was a homemaker.
His U.S. Marine Corps service across 1946–1952 — across multiple American Far-East-and-Pacific service positions, particularly in Qingdao, China — preceded his early-1950s American journalism-and-broadcasting career. His 1956 admission to the Pasadena Playhouse alongside Dustin Hoffman (with whom Hackman shared the Pasadena Playhouse "Least Likely to Succeed" student-poll selection in 1956) launched his early-career American theatrical public profile.
His 1961 first New York Off-Broadway debut and his subsequent 1964 first Broadway-cast appearance in the Lawrence Roman play Any Wednesday launched his early-career American Broadway public profile. His 1964 first feature-film appearance in Lilith (alongside Warren Beatty) and his subsequent 1967 supporting role as Buck Barrow in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (which earned him the 1968 Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination) launched his late-1960s American film public profile.
His 1971 lead role as NYPD detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle in William Friedkin's The French Connection won him the 1972 Best Actor Academy Award. His subsequent feature-film career has produced multiple defining American films — particularly Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974), Richard Donner's Superman (1978, in which he played Lex Luthor) and the 1980 sequel Superman II, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992, which won him the 1993 Best Supporting Actor Academy Award). He retired from acting in 2004 after Welcome to Mooseport. He has been with American homemaker Betsy Arakawa since 1991 (married 1991). He died on February 26, 2025, at age 95, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, of cardiovascular-disease complications and Alzheimer's disease.
His name Gene is the English short form of Eugene (from the Greek Eugenios meaning "well-born"). Gene was a popular American boys' name across the early-to-mid 20th century.
About the name Gene
Gender: Male · Origin: English
Abbreviation Of Eugene Wellborn.