Hackman Connection

It was the year of the Tramp in the Academy Awards. With the little fellow's creator, Charlie Chaplin, on hand for his honorary Oscar, the rest of the usual inanity was almost bearable. In its professional judgments, the Academy showed an unforgivable lapse: neither John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday nor Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange collected a single Oscar. The acting awards, on the other hand, were highly plausible. Most striking was Jane Fonda's citation as Best Actress for her portrayal of a call girl in Klute, showing that Hollywood is no longer totally hysterical about off-screen ventures in radical politics. Most popular--short of the cheering, weeping ovation for Chaplin --was Gene Hackman's Best Actor award for his performance as a narcotics cop in The French Connection, proving what all actors yearn to believe: a nice, hard-working guy can still get ahead in the movies on his merits. TIME Correspondent Roland Flamini interviewed Hackman in Los Angeles and sent this report:

When Gene Hackman was a young man just out of the Marines, he "slipped and slid around" New York City for two years in one job after another. One night, while he was working as a doorman at a Howard Johnson's restaurant in Times Square, his old Marine captain walked by. Their eyes met in awkward recognition. The captain looked him up and down and sneered: "Hackman, you're a sorry son of a bitch."

That encounter 18 years ago was the end of Hackman's slipping and sliding. Although he had never thought of acting before, he joined the Premise, an off-Broadway theater--not so much in quest of stardom as simply to get some meaning into his life. By last week, when he stood onstage in the Chandler Pavilion clutching his statuette, he had found both. He has become one of the best-liked of Hollywood professionals, a shambling, shirtsleeves type who actually uses words like "golly" and "gee" and is still married to his first wife after 14 years. He has also become one of the most gifted of character actors, a sublime technician for whom no inward emotion is too big to be fixed firmly in the smallest outward detail.

Borrowed Tricks. Hackman is a sort of blue-collar actor, slightly embarrassed about art but avid about craft. For his Oscar-winning role as the obsessive, foul-mouthed Popeye Doyle, he served an apprenticeship in Harlem with Eddie Egan, the real-life detective on whose exploits The French Connection was based. "It was scary as hell," Hackman says. "We'd burst into a crowded bar, and Egan would put on a drill instructor's voice, flat and unemotional, and yet authoritative. If anyone talked back, his voice would go a pitch higher. He always won." In the film, Hackman borrowed such Egan tricks as shoving a suspect into a telephone booth to subdue him.

To reach the subtly modulated power of his Popeye characterization, Hackman had a long climb. His work at the Premise led to a string of plays on Broadway, culminating in a leading role opposite Sandy Dennis in Any Wednesday in 1964. Meanwhile, he had edged into movies with a small part in Lilith. Recalls Warren Beatty, the picture's star: "It was only a two-minute scene, but the best thing about Lilith was Gene Hackman." When Beatty was casting Bonnie and Clyde three years later, he thought of Hackman for the role of Clyde's brother Buck. Hackman's performance won him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and the offers began coming in.

By his own admission, Hackman grabbed unselectively at too many of them and bogged down in a mire of forgettable films (The Split, Marooned). "You have to recognize," he says, "that there's a monster out there called unemployment." Finally one of the offers turned out to be for the part of the long-suffering son in I Never Sang for My Father. Hackman's engaging, sensitive portrayal won him a second Oscar nomination last year for Best Supporting Actor. Largely on the strength of that, he made his connection with Popeye (others who were considered for the role: Jimmy Breslin, Steve McQueen, Jackie Gleason).

Stunt Driving. Which is the real Gene Hackman? The decent, gentle fellow in Father or the raw, aggressive one in Connection? Answer: A little of both. Hackman retains much of the flavor of his small-town upbringing in Danville, Ill. Away from the set he spends most of his time lazing with his family in his Tudor-style home in the San Fernando Valley. At the same time, he has "an affinity for certain dangers." These used to include motorcycle and auto racing (he did about half of his own stunt driving in Connection), but now are limited mostly to flying rented planes.

Now that Hackman's star status could command a wide range of roles, he plans to keep right on doing character parts. He will play an aging Midwestern dirt racer in Good Luck, Roy Neal, which will start shooting in July. Next he has his eye on a script about a fireman. In another ten years, he maintains, he may quit acting altogether. "I want to relax, paint, read and maybe even write," he says. "I don't see myself as a distinguished old actor." Perhaps not, but if that Marine captain were to turn up again in 20 years, chances are that's exactly what he would see.

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