“He has bags under his eyes, and his face has caved in a bit,” wrote Pauline Kael of Gene Hackman. “Maybe that’s why when he lights up, it really means something.”
Kael’s observation illuminates two important aspects of Hackman’s screen persona: his slightly lopsided physiognomy – all broad, solid planes resolving into a sceptical and tender trickster grin – and how it helped him render complex and contradictory emotions tactile in real time.
Such deceptive expressiveness, yoked to shrewd instincts and disciplined technique, made the California native – who has been found dead at 95 with his wife Betsy Arakawa at their home in New Mexico – an icon of American cinema. A two-time Academy Award winner who worked steadily for nearly six decades before officially confirming his retirement in 2008, Hackman was perhaps the most craggily axiomatic leading man of the New Hollywood; a consistent critical darling and box office draw who redefined the idea of a leading man through his own image…