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  3. Oh no – what a fine actor.

    So many great roles, but his performance in Mississippi Burning stands out for me.

    Bad day today, also heard that one of Ireland’s finest – Jennifer Johnston – has dies. What a writer she was, never a word or phrase out of place. No book was much over 200 pages and yet she packed more emotional truth than all these 500 page potboilers that are all the rage these days – How Many miles to Babylon, The Captain and Kings, The Old Just, Shadows on the Skin. A wonderful writer.

    • Weirdly, after about 40 years I watched Superman I on Sunday,. Having not seen it since I was a kid – when we endlessly watched our crackly VHS copy – it was obvious how Hackman was boss of ever scene he was in, whether his supporting cast of hoodlums or the wooden Reeve. Absolutely magnificent.

    • Indeed, TV boxset series are awash with octos currently, still playing tough guys. If I thought Kevin Costner, at 69, was a little too mature for his role in Yellowstone, along come the prequels, 1883, with the 80 year old Sam Elliott, still excellent, and Harrison Ford, 83, in 1923. Each, however, have the reverse and upside down pixie ear of face lifts, mind, where the lobe is tugged to one side, almost prehensily.
      Once you start looking, loads of actors have had this work!!

  7. Sad news, one of my absolute favourite actors.

    I first encountered Hackman when I was still a little kid, through viewings of the long forgotten witness protection on a train drama Narrow Margin and the still very watchable Kevin Costner thriller No Way Out. He stood out to me immediately as completely magnetic.

    Hackman’s filmography is just banger after banger after banger, stretching from the very birth of modern Hollywood (Bonnie & Clyde), through the peak auteur years (French Connection, The Conversation), and on through virtually every genre.

    Mississippi Burning is mentioned above. A fabulous movie, I rewatched it only last week. Hackman brings to his role what he brought to virtually every role; a deep sense of a complex inner life whirring away behind the mask. Even his great villains (and god knows he played some great villains) carried with them this sort of odd vulnerability, like they were heroes who’d simply lost their way and needed a mother’s love. Even when he was playing outright evil, a little bit of you always ended up rooting for him.

    He did great work right up until he retired, playing perhaps the most quintessentially Hackmanish character of them all in The Royal Tennebaums and blowing Dustin Hoffman offscreen in The Runaway Jury.

    But probably my favourite Hackman role of all is his turn as the Sheriff in Sam Raimi’s 1995 bomb The Quick & The Dead. Intended as a post Basic Instinct vehicle for Sharon Stone, the movie focuses on a small Wild West town that stages a single elimination tournament for gunslingers. It catches a stellar ensemble cast with many members on their way up; alongside Stone are a pre-LA Confidential Russell Crowe, a tiny Leo DiCaprio, Gary Sinise, Keith David and Lance Henriksen. It’s very silly, very stylish and a huge amount of fun. As the body count piles up, Hackman towers over everyone else as the fastest gun of them all, menacing and charming in equal measure, taking his recent cache from Unforgiven and running with it. You can see he’s having so much fun with it, a real thing of joy.

    So that’s the one I’ll be watching tonight. Or maybe Crimson Tide. Or Reds. or Hoosiers. Or Class Action. Or The Firm. God, he was great.

  9. I recall seeing Mississippi Burning in the cinema. An excellent film that he was central to. It’s only when you look at his filmography that you realise how many films that are good or better he has been in. On, mostly, he was the best thing in those films.

  10. One of my favourites is Night Moves in which he plays a private investigator. But unlike most PI’s in films, he isn’t the smartest.
    Lots of actors would have refused to play a role like that.

    • I will second that: as challenging a 1970s Hollywood film as “Chinatown” and with a very downbeat ending, but for some reason not many people have seen it. ( And set in the Gulf of MEXICO btw)

  12. So many terrific films mentioned above – what a CV he had. He was also a great comic turn. Let us not forget him as the blind man in Young Frankenstein, and he also held his own, comedy-wise, against Robin Williams and Nathan Lane in The Birdcage (although nobody needed to see the great man in drag).

    His last film, the little-seen Welcome to Mooseport, is a nice, cosy bit of fun that’s worth checking out, with Gene H as an ex-President running for election of a Local Hero-type small town.

    RIP to one of the best.

  13. Probably of much less significance to the AW cognoscenti, but the shocking and untimely death of Michelle Trachtenberg has really hit me hard. Never could I have imagined that of all the Buffy alumni, she would be the first to leave us.

      • Yes, that was a shock. She built up quite a filmography in a relatively short space of time. I never saw her in Gossip Girl, which was apparently one of her most popular roles, but I always liked her in Buffy. She nailed the “a bit of a bratty teenager but you hope everything works out for her in the end” role very well, and joining such a big show in season 5 and making a real impact must have been a very hard thing to pull off.

        She was also good fun in Eurotrip, which plays on every stereotypical American’s view of Europe but is still very funny.

        39 is too young for anybody to leave us. RIP.

  14. The Poseidon Adventure. One of the first Disaster movies and the most entertaining. His driving of the rest of the cast through it all. And upside down, too…

    I’ve seen both French Connections dozens of times. The grimy and crumbling New York City of the 1970’s fascinates me. A sinister place. All that tension and the constant pursuits of Frog One never realised

    The second in Marseilles. Again a decayed place. The to and fro with the French barman, trying to order a bourbon and eating hard boiled eggs. Wonderfully played.

    ‘Ever pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?’

    ‘I was gonna make espresso…’

    RIP. What a talent.

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