From a hard-nosed narcotics officer, to an inspirational basketball coach, to a corrupt Western sheriff and more, Gene Hackman's Oscar and Golden Globe-winning, five-decade acting career was distinguished by remarkable versatility, creating an unforgettable body of work that in 2003 earned him the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement.
The decorated actor and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, were found dead in their home on Wednesday, the Santa Fe County, New Mexico Sheriff's Office said. Hackman was 95 and his wife was 64. Authorities said they do not suspect foul play and that a cause of death has not yet been determined.
Here's a look back at some of Hackman's most memorable roles.
Following small roles in a handful of films, Hackman scored his big break in "Bonnie and Clyde" as Buck Barrow, the older brother of Warren Beatty's Clyde Barrow, who's shot and killed as he joins his brother and his partner, Faye Dunaway's Bonnie Parker, on their robbery and murder spree. Hackman's performance earned him a best supporting actor Academy Award nomination.
Hackman played the role of Gene Garrison, a son forced into a contentious relationship with his aging, demanding father after his mother dies. Based on the hit Broadway drama, the film – and Hackman's performance in particular – earned widespread critical acclaim and earned Hackman his second Oscar nomination.
Hackman's role as hard-nosed, tenacious New York City narcotics Detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle, who works to track down a French heroin dealer, earned him his first Academy Award win, for best actor, as well as a Golden Globe, BAFTA and other awards. The film itself won the best picture Oscar and spawned a 1975 sequel in which Hackman also starred.
Hackman followed his success in "The French Connection" with writer/director Francis Ford Coppola's suspense thriller "The Conversation" just three years later, playing a paranoid audio surveillance expert who encounters troubling evidence while on the job that forces him into a moral crisis. Hackman's performance was Golden Globe nominated.
Hackman further demonstrated his acting range in the then-uncredited cameo role of the blind hermit who befriends Peter Boyle's Monster in the Mel Brooks comedy-horror classic "Young Frankenstein." Hackman is nearly unrecognizable in the role, and ad-libbed his character's final line: "I was going to make espresso!"
Hackman played one of the most notorious villains in comics and cinema history as Superman's arch nemesis Lex Luthor, opposite Christopher Reeve's Man of Steel. The action-comedy was a global box office smash and spawned four sequels starring Reeve, with Hackman reprising his role as Luthor in two of them: 1980's "Superman II" and "Superman IV: The Quest for Peace" in 1987.
Hackman worked with Warren Beatty again in 1974's Oscar-winning "Reds," based on the life of journalist John Reed and his first-hand reporting on the 1917 Russian October Revolution. Hackman played the supporting role of Pete Van Wherry, Reed's newspaper editor in New York City.
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Hired as a high school basketball coach in a small town in Indiana, Hackman's Coach Norman Dale led the team to a state championship as he attempted to redeem his own troubled past. Also starring Barbara Hershey and Dennis Hopper, "Hoosiers" went on to become one of the most beloved sports films in U.S. history.
Based in part on the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers, "Mississippi Burning" featured Hackman in the role of two-fisted FBI Agent Rupert Anderson opposite Willem Dafoe's more by-the-book Agent Alan Ward. Though the film was criticized by some for fictionalizing actual events it was a box office and critical hit, and earned Hackman a best actor Oscar nomination.
Hackman gave his most celebrated performance of the 1990s in writer/director Clint Eastwood's acclaimed Western, "Unforgiven." Hackman played the sadistic Sheriff "Little" Bill Daggett, who meets his end at the hands of Eastwood's notorious outlaw William Munny. "Unforgiven" won Hackman his second best supporting actor Academy Award, as well as a Golden Globe and a BAFTA.
Hackman returned to the Western genre three years after "Unforgiven" in 1995's "The Quick and the Dead." Hackman joined an all-star cast that included Sharon Stone, Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio as former outlaw turned corrupt Mayor John Herod, who orchestrates a series of quick-draw gunfights, only to himself be killed by Sharon Stone's Ellen, the daughter of the town's former sheriff whom Herod lynched years earlier.
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Hackman starred as Royal Tenenbaum in the offbeat Wes Anderson comedy-drama, patriarch of a gifted but chaotic family, all of whom are navigating an existential crisis. Boasting an all-star cast that included Bill Murray, Luke and Owen Wilson, Anjelica Huston, Danny Glover, Ben Stiller and Gwyneth Paltrow, "The Royal Tenenbaums" earned Hackman yet another Golden Globe nomination.
