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Actor Gene Hackman, prolific Oscar winner, found dead at home at 95 years old

Published

1 year ago

February 27, 2025

Actor Gene Hackman, prolific Oscar winner, found dead at home at 95 years old

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Gene Hackman, the prolific Oscar-winning actor whose studied portraits ranged from reluctant heroes to conniving villains and made him one of the industry’s most respected and honored performers, has been found dead along with his wife at their home. He was 95.

Hackman was a frequent and versatile presence on screen from the 1960s into the 20th century. His dozens of films included the Academy Award favorites “The French Connection” and “Unforgiven,” a breakout performance in “Bonnie and Clyde,” a classic bit of farce in “Young Frankenstein” and featured parts in “Reds” and “No Way Out.” He seemed capable of any kind of role — whether an uptight buffoon in “Birdcage,” a college coach finding redemption in the sentimental favorite “Hoosiers” or a secretive surveillance expert in the Watergate-era release “The Conversation.”

Although self-effacing and unfashionable, Hackman held special status within Hollywood — heir to Spencer Tracy as an every man, actor’s actor, curmudgeon and reluctant celebrity. He embodied the ethos of doing his job, doing it very well, and letting others worry about his image. Beyond the obligatory appearances at awards ceremonies, he was rarely seen on the social circuit and made no secret of his disdain for the business side of show business.

“Actors tend to be shy people,” he told Film Comment in 1988. “There is perhaps a component of hostility in that shyness, and to reach a point where you don’t deal with others in a hostile or angry way, you choose this medium for yourself … Then you can express yourself and get this wonderful feedback.”

He was an early retiree — essentially done, by choice, with movies by his mid-70s — and a late bloomer. Hackman was 35 when cast for “Bonnie and Clyde” and past 40 when he won his first Oscar, as the rules-bending New York City detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in the 1971 thriller about tracking down Manhattan drug smugglers, “The French Connection.”

Jackie Gleason, Steve McQueen and Peter Boyle were among the actors considered for Doyle. Hackman was a minor star at the time, seemingly without the flamboyant personality that the role demanded. The actor himself feared that he was miscast. A couple of weeks of nighttime patrols of Harlem in police cars helped reassure him.

One of the first scenes of “The French Connection” required Hackman to slap around a suspect. The actor realized he had failed to achieve the intensity that the scene required, and asked director William Friedkin for another chance. The scene was filmed at the end of the shooting, by which time Hackman had immersed himself in the loose-cannon character of Popeye Doyle. Friedkin would recall needing 37 takes to get the scene right.

“I had to arouse an anger in Gene that was lying dormant, I felt, within him — that he was sort of ashamed of and didn’t really want to revisit,” Friedkin told the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2012.

The most famous sequence was dangerously realistic: A car chase in which Det. Doyle speeds under elevated subway tracks, his brown Pontiac (driven by a stuntman) screeching into areas that the filmmakers had not received permits for. When Doyle crashes into a white Ford, it wasn’t a stuntman driving the other car, but a New York City resident who didn’t know a movie was being made.

Hackman also resisted the role which brought him his second Oscar. When Clint Eastwood first offered him Little Bill Daggett, the corrupt town boss in “Unforgiven,” Hackman turned it down. But he realized that Eastwood was planning to make a different kind of western, a critique, not a celebration of violence. The film won him the Academy Award as best supporting actor of 1992.

“To his credit, and my joy, he talked me into it,” Hackman said of Eastwood during an interview with the American Film Institute.

Eugene Allen Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California, and grew up in Danville, Illinois, where his father worked as a pressman for the Commercial-News. His parents fought repeatedly, and his father often used his fists on Gene to take out his rage. The boy found refuge in movie houses, identifying with such screen rebels as Errol Flynn and James Cagney as his role models.

When Gene was 13, his father waved goodbye and drove off, never to return. The abandonment was a lasting injury to Gene. His mother had become an alcoholic and was constantly at odds with her mother, with whom the shattered family lived (Gene had a younger brother, actor Richard Hackman). At 16, he “suddenly got the itch to get out.” Lying about his age, he enlisted in the U.S. Marines. In his early 30s, before his film career took off, his mother died in a fire started by her own cigarette.

“Dysfunctional families have sired a lot of pretty good actors,” he observed ironically during a 2001 interview with The New York Times.

His brawling and resistance to authority led to his being demoted from corporal three times. His taste of show business came when he conquered his mic fright and became disc jockey and news announcer on his unit’s radio station.

With a high school degree he earned during his time as a Marine, Hackman enrolled in journalism at the University of Illinois. He dropped out after six months to study radio announcing in New York. After working at stations in Florida and his hometown of Danville, he returned to New York to study painting at the Art Students League. Hackman switched again to enter an acting course at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Back in New York, he found work as a doorman and truck driver among other jobs waiting for a break as an actor, sweating it out with such fellow hopefuls as Robert Duvall and Dustin Hoffman. Summer work at a theater on Long Island led to roles off-Broadway. Hackman began attracting attention from Broadway producers, and he received good notices in such plays as “Any Wednesday,” with Sandy Dennis, and “Poor Richard,” with Alan Bates.

During a tryout in New Haven for another play, Hackman was seen by film director Robert Rossen, who hired him for a brief role in “Lilith,” which starred Warren Beatty and Jean Seberg. He played small roles in other films, including “Hawaii,” and leads in television dramas of the early 1960s such as “The Defenders” and “Naked City.”

When Beatty began work on “Bonnie and Clyde,” which he produced and starred in, he remembered Hackman and cast him as bank robber Clyde Barrow’s outgoing brother. Pauline Kael in the New Yorker called Hackman’s work “a beautifully controlled performance, the best in the film,” and he was nominated for an Academy Award as supporting actor.

Hackman nearly appeared in another immortal film of 1967, “The Graduate.” He was supposed to play the cuckolded husband of Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), but director Mike Nichols decided he was too young and replaced him with Murray Hamilton. Two years later, he was considered for what became one of television’s most famous roles, patriarch Mike Brady of “The Brady Bunch.” Producer Sherwood Schwartz wanted Hackman to audition, but network executives thought he was too obscure. (The part went to Robert Reed).

Hackman’s first starring film role came in 1970 with “I Never Sang for My Father,” as a man struggling to deal with a failed relationship with his dying father, Melvyn Douglas. Because of Hackman’s distress over his own father, he resisted connecting to the role.

In his 2001 Times interview, he recalled: “Douglas told me, `Gene, you’ll never get what you want with the way you’re acting.’ And he didn’t mean acting; he meant I was not behaving myself. He taught me not to use my reservations as an excuse for not doing the job.” Even though he had the central part, Hackman was Oscar-nominated as supporting actor and Douglas as lead. The following year he won the Oscar as best actor for “The French Connection.”

Through the years, Hackman kept working, in pictures good and bad. For a time he seemed to be in a contest with Michael Caine for the world’s busiest Oscar winner. In 2001 alone, he appeared in “The Mexican,” “Heartbreakers,” “Heist,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Behind Enemy Lines.” But by 2004, he was openly talking about retirement, telling Larry King he had no projects lined up. His only credit in recent years was narrating a Smithsonian Channel documentary, “The Unknown Flag Raiser of Iwo Jima.”

In 1956, Hackman married Fay Maltese, a bank teller he had met at a YMCA dance in New York. They had a son, Christopher, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Leslie, but divorced in the mid-1980s. In 1991 he married Betsy Arakawa, a classical pianist.

When not on film locations, Hackman enjoyed painting, stunt flying, stock car racing and deep sea diving. In his latter years, he wrote novels and lived on his ranch in Sante Fe, New Mexico, on a hilltop looking out on the Colorado Rockies, a view he preferred to his films that popped up on television.

“I’ll watch maybe five minutes of it,” he once told Time magazine, “and I’ll get this icky feeling, and I turn the channel.”

___

Bob Thomas, a longtime Associated Press journalist who died in 2014, compiled biographical material for this obituary.

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World

Sombr Altercation at Brit Awards Was Staged, Rep Confirms

Published

7 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Press Room

Sombr Altercation at Brit Awards Was Staged, Rep Confirms

Sombr was mid-performance at the Brit Awards when a random man bumrushed the stage and pushed the singer off the platform, leaving him stunned — only it was all planned, says his rep.

The singer-songwriter, who was nominated for international artist and international song, was at the end of his smash single “Undressed” when a man joined him on the podium and shoved him hard. Security guards aggressively removed the man from the stage, and Sombr returned to the microphone to segue into his next song.

Shortly after the performance came to a close, Sombr’s rep confirmed to Variety that the whole thing was part of the act. Fans were already split online over whether the incident was staged or real. Naysayers noticed that the offender was wearing a shirt that read “Sombr is a homewrecker” — a nod to his latest single “Homewrecker,” which some claimed was a dead giveaway. But others weren’t necessarily convinced it was a stunt, considering how hard he was pushed and how additional security guards came to his rescue.

Brits host Jack Whitehall remarked on the incident after Sombr’s performance concluded. “Such a shame we didn’t have the security ready,” he said.

The incident took place just days after Britain’s BAFTA Awards last Sunday, when John Davidson, the Scottish Tourette’s syndrome activist and real-life inspiration for the film “I Swear,” disrupted that ceremony with an outburst of racial slurs that occurred as “Sinners” stars Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were onstage. “I can’t begin to explain how upset and distraught I have been as the impact from Sunday sinks in,” Davidson told Variety earlier this week.

Whitehall made a joking reference to that incident — which was not bleeped from the initial BAFTA broadcast and was audible to viewers — at the top of the Brits, saying “We’ve got the best in the business on the bleep button.”

Sombr is coming off a red-hot year that saw his various singles “Undressed,” “Back to Friends” and “12 to 12” impact the charts. He recently performed at the Grammy Awards, where he was nominated for best new artist alongside Addison Rae, Alex Warren, the Marías, Leon Thomas, Lola Young, Katseye and Olivia Dean, who ended up taking home the award.

World

Iran goes dark amid ‘regime paranoia’, blackout follows Israeli, US strikes on compound

Published

9 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Press Room

Iran goes dark amid ‘regime paranoia’, blackout follows Israeli, US strikes on compound

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Iran was plunged into an internet blackout Saturday after Israel and the U.S. launched military strikes around the country, according to a global internet monitor.

Within hours of the strikes — which officials said targeted infrastructure and killed dozens of senior regime figures at a compound in Tehran— NetBlocks CEO Alp Toker confirmed connectivity started “flatlining.”

“We’re tracking the ongoing blackout, but our assessment is that this is straight out of Iran’s wartime playbook and consistent both technically and strategically with what we saw during the 2025 Twelve-Day War with Israel,” Toker told Fox News Digital.

“Iran’s internet connectivity is now flatlining around the 1% level, so the original blackout the regime imposed during the morning has been consolidated,” he confirmed.

“The blackout was imposed just after 7:00 UTC, not long after the attack on the Iranian regime compound,” Toker clarified, adding that Iran had been largely offline for approximately 12 hours following the attack.

“At 06:10 UTC, there is the main compound strike; at 07:10 UTC, telecoms disruption starts; at 08:00 UTC, the blackout is largely in effect; and by 08:30 UTC, connectivity flatlines.”

“Wartime national blackouts are exceedingly rare around the world, and it’s something we’ve only really seen at this scale in Iran,” he said.

President Donald Trump monitors U.S. military operations in Iran following an Israeli strike in Tehran on Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026. (@WhiteHouse/X)

In the wake of the attack, dubbed Operation Epic Fury, President Donald Trump said on Truth Social that the “heavy and pinpoint” bombing in Iran “will continue uninterrupted throughout the week or as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”

He claimed Iranian security forces and members of the regime’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were already seeking immunity. He urged them to “peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots.”

“We are hearing that many of their IRGC, Military, and other Security and Police Forces no longer want to fight and are looking for Immunity from us,” Trump said in the post. “As I said last night, ‘Now they can have Immunity; later they only get Death!’”

Toker argued the timing of the blackout suggested it was imposed deliberately as the regime sought to secure communications amid fears of further targeting.

TRUMP TELLS IRANIANS THE ‘HOUR OF YOUR FREEDOM IS AT HAND’ AS US-ISRAEL LAUNCH STRIKES AGAINST IRAN

TEHRAN, IRAN – FEBRUARY 28: Smoke rises over the city center after an Israeli army launches 2nd wave of airstrikes on Iran on February 28, 2026. (Photo by Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images) (Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“The Iranian regime will have deployed this new blackout to counter potential cyberattacks during their own military operation, but also to avoid leaking the locations of senior regime figures through metadata and user-generated content,” he said.

“Communications would have been limited, and Iran’s leadership would have proceeded with the assumption that all communications, including satellite or whitelisted networks, carry risks,” he said before claiming that “paranoia would be well grounded at this point, with the blackout a belated but direct response to that.”

“Those participating directly would already know to avoid technology that could betray their whereabouts,” Toker said.

“However, the metadata may well have played a part in determining that the meeting of regime leaders was being held at the Tehran compound, who was in attendance, and at what time.”

DID THEY GET HIM? KHAMENEI’S FATE REMAINS UNKNOWN AFTER ISRAEL-US STRIKE LEVELS HIS COMPOUND

In this handout image provided by the Office of the Supreme Leader of Iran, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei addresses the nation in a state television broadcast on June 18, 2025 in Tehran, Iran. (Office of the Supreme Leader of Iran via Getty Images)

Toker revealed that the broader network around the regime leaders and around the compound wouldn’t have had the same strict restrictions.

“This kind of adjacent ‘background noise’ can be correlated against other intelligence sources to build an understanding of activity on the ground,” he added.

“Smartphones are a readily available, almost ‘free’ source of intelligence, and even when locked down, they eventually connect to international online services and generate insights that can be used to pinpoint regime figures,” Toker said.

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“In the aftermath of Saturday’s strike, this concern will have been high on the remaining Iranian leadership’s minds, especially if they didn’t have a clear and specific understanding of how the meeting was compromised.”

Iran has previously imposed sweeping internet shutdowns during periods of domestic unrest, including nationwide protests in January, which saw thousands killed, often seeking to curb the spread of information and restrict coordination.

Emma Bussey is a breaking news writer for Fox News Digital. Before joining Fox, she worked at The Telegraph with the U.S. overnight team, across desks including foreign, politics, news, sport and culture.

World

Activists hail ‘historic’ EU’s decision on accessible abortion

Published

10 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Press Room

Activists hail ‘historic’ EU’s decision on accessible abortion

Women’s rights groups and activists hailed the European Commission’s decision on accessible abortion across Europe, calling it a “historic” move for women’s rights and European democracy.

The move marks an unusual step taken by the European Union, as healthcare policy is typically determined at a national level.

On Thursday, the European Commission confirmed member states can use an EU social fund to provide access to safe and legal abortion for women who are barred from doing so in their home country.

Member states can make use of the bloc’s existing European Social Fund Plus (ESF+), which contributes to social, education, employment and healthcare policies, voluntarily and in accordance with their domestic laws to provide such support.

“We were very aware of the competence that the European Union has in this area, which is restricted,” Europe’s Associate Director for the Center for Reproductive Rights Katrine Thomasen told Euronews, pointing to the fact that the bloc can support, coordinate or supplement the actions of members states, but cannot impede on national laws, such as healthcare policies.

The Commission stopped short of creating a new funding mechanism, which was requested by the European Parliament in a non-binding resolution adopted in December.

Critics argued that by declining to establish a dedicated fund and instead referring to an existing one, the EU was effectively failing to act and rejecting the proposal.

However, women’s rights organisations say the decision affirms that the EU has the competence to act on sexual and reproductive heath and creates a pathway towards accessible abortion.

“It was previously not clear that member states could use EU funding to provide abortion care to women facing barriers,” Thomasen said, “the Commission’s decision is really the first time that it is affirming and deciding that EU funds can be used in this way”.

Member states that wish to benefit from the ESF+ to offer accessible abortion services will now need to establish programmes and define how patients can benefit from it.

‘My Voice, My Choice’

The Commission’s decision came in response to a call made by the citizens’ initiative “My Voice, My Choice” for the creation of an EU solidarity mechanism to guarantee safe and affordable access to abortion for all women.

“My Voice, My Choice” is a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), a mechanism that allows citizens to call on the European Commission to propose new legislation.

If an initiative gets the support of at least one million people across at least seven EU countries, it must be discussed by the European Parliament, while the European Commission has a timeframe to either set out legislative measures or provide justification for not doing so.

“My Voice, My Choice” collected 1,124,513 signatures across all 27 countries.

“My Voice, My Choice started on the streets, it started with a group of women who had had enough that women are secondary citizens,” the initiative’s coordinator Nika Kovač told Euronews.

“We decided to take action and we brought something to the table. We brought our own chair to the places where we usually don’t have the chairs,” Kovač added.

The movement gained cross-border momentum, with women’s rights activists mobilising across Europe. With over one million followers on Instagram, “My Voice, My Choice” also built a strong online presence.

Dutch journalist Belle de Jong campaigned for the initiative in Malta, where abortion remains criminalised and heavily restricted. She described the challenges of organising on the ground, noting that many women were reluctant to take to the streets because of stigma and fear of legal consequences.

De Jong told Euronews that the campaign’s success in Malta was largely because it was online, “so people didn’t have to go out into the streets or show their face,” she said, adding that she collected more than 4,000 signatures for Malta, more than double she expected.

“Thanks to My Voice, My Choice, we no longer have an excuse to prosecute women for accessing healthcare, because we’re paying for them to go abroad with this EU mechanism. So it really begs the question: when are we going to decriminalise it? That will be our next fight in Malta,” she added.

The decision sparked a range of reactions from politicians

Several members of the European Parliament have expressed satisfaction after the Commission’s statements.

“For the first time the Commission has confirmed that countries can use EU funds to support access to abortion care. This is a victory for European women”, said Slovenian Socialist MEP Matjaž Nemec, who penned a letter to the Commission ahead of the decision.

Valérie Hayer, President of Renew Europe, said the decision “marked real progress for women’s rights,” underlining that the Commission had never before stated so clearly that EU funding can support access to safe abortion.

Other MEP’s, including Emma Fourreau from the Left group and French MEP Mélissa Camara from the Greens/EFA group considered the move a step forward, but would have liked to see a dedicated budget.

On the other side, far-right Spanish party Vox claimed that the Commission has rejected the “My Voice, My Choice” initiative, as there will be no specific fund to finance abortions abroad. “The Commission is just trying to politically save the initiative by pointing out existing instruments,” a press release from the party states.

The Italian anti-abortion association “Pro Vita & Famiglia” (Pro Life and Family) also considered that the initiative was rejected, while criticising its opening up to the use of ESF+ money to finance reproductive healthcare. “We ask the Italian government not to use this money to promote abortions”, said spokesperson Maria Rachele Ruiu.

Abortion policies across the European Union

Some EU countries have highly restrictive laws on abortion rights. A total ban is in force in Malta, where abortion is not allowed under any circumstances, while in Poland it is permitted only when conception follows sexual violence or when there is a risk to the woman’s health.

In January 2021, the Polish Constitutional Tribunal banned abortions in cases of fetal malformation, which until then had been the most frequent reason for terminating pregnancies in the country.

Several EU countries have taken steps to guarantee the right to safe abortions. France, for instance, made it a constitutional right, while Luxembourg and the Netherlands have removed mandatory waiting periods.

Sweden, France, and the Netherlands rank best in the European Union for abortion rights, according to the European Abortion Policies Atlas 2025. Malta and Poland remain at the bottom of the ranking, along with Andorra, Liechtenstein and Monaco.

Some countries have more relaxed laws, but they lack legal protections that fully decriminalise abortion, wide service availability, national health coverage, or government-led information on the matter.

Other member states have recorded new restrictions, increased harassment of abortion providers, and the spread of disinformation on the topic.