Word: hackman
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...there: he must spend more time acting than Michael Caine put together. This fall, five Hackman films were released. "I'll take what's offered me," he says, "as long as it falls into certain parameters. I'm not going for the home run every time." Sometimes Hackman has hit bunt singles in a movie resume as long as a Chicago Cubs season. Yet he projects such solid authority that not even junk can embarrass him. "I actually think I've been lucky," says the star who can't say no. "Working constantly not only keeps me sharp, but relieves...
...Hackman learned a lot, the hard way, before he ever stepped in front of the camera. His father, a newspaper pressman in Danville, Ill., beat young Gene. "Though he left town when I was 13," Hackman recalls, "he'd drift back periodically to disrupt things. I was so shy that I never dated in high school. Sexual frustration, plus my unwillingness to live up to my mother's expectations or to be a father to my younger brother, gave me more than enough reasons to get out of town and join the Marines." His lone consolations were a doting grandmother...
They must have seemed pipe dreams at the Pasadena Playhouse, where Hackman took acting classes in the mid-'50s; the school voted him, and fellow student Dustin Hoffman, Least Likely to Succeed. A decade of small parts and menial jobs kept him going until 1964, when he scored in the Broadway comedy Any Wednesday. Three years later he made a screen impact in Bonnie and Clyde, and Hackman could finally support his wife Faye and three children from his actor's earnings. The couple were divorced in 1985, after 30 years of marriage. "Acting is a selfish profession," he says...
...pictures, Hackman rates six as really good: Bonnie and Clyde (Buck Barrow, Clyde's elder brother), The French Connection (an Oscar as New York cop Popeye Doyle), Scarecrow (on the road with Al Pacino), The Conversation (Francis Coppola's study of a lonely surveillance expert), Under Fire (as a TIME correspondent in Nicaragua) and Mississippi Burning. His FBI agent bears traces of early Hackmen. Anderson, like Buck Barrow, repeats favorite anecdotes and plays dumber than he is; like Popeye, he wears stumpy ties and catches bad guys on his own obsessive terms. And at the end of each sentence...
...Hackman can laugh all the way to the bank; at almost $2 million a picture, $ the money adds up. But even a workaholic must hear the ticking of a gold watch in his future. "There's a big part of me that wants to quit," he says, "and I'm listening more and more to that voice. But I tried pulling back before, after Superman in 1978, and found out there wasn't much else I was suited for." That's O.K. Hackman's job -- and his capstone role as Anderson -- fits him as snugly as the gray suits...