Gene Hackman, the intense character actor who won two Oscars in a more than 60-year career, died of unknown causes alongside his wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa, and their dog at home, the sheriff’s office in Santa Fe, New Mexico, said yesterday.
The 95-year-old actor and Arakawa, 64, were found dead in separate rooms on Wednesday at around 1.45pm, the Santa Fe County sheriff’s office said in a statement, promising to release more information later yesterday.
“Foul play is not suspected as a factor in those deaths at this time, however exact cause of death has not been determined,” the statement said. The sheriff’s office applied for a search warrant on Wednesday evening, telling the judge the deaths were “suspicious enough in nature to require a thorough search and investigation.”
The warrant application said the maintenance worker who discovered the bodies had found the home’s front door ajar, although there were no signs of forced entry, and that there were no obvious signs of a gas leak, although that possibility was still under investigation, or a carbon monoxide leak.
Sheriff’s deputies found Hackman in the kitchen, and Arakawa and the dog in a bathroom, with scattered pills from an open prescription bottle on the bathroom counter. Both Hackman and Arakawa appeared to have suddenly fallen to the floor and neither showed signs of blunt force trauma, the affidavit said.
Hackman, a former Marine known for his raspy voice, appeared in more than 80 films, as well as on television and the stage during a lengthy career that started in the early 1960s.
He earned his first Oscar nomination for his breakout role as the brother of bank robber Clyde Barrow in 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde. He was also nominated for best supporting actor in 1971 for I Never Sang for My Father.
It was his turn as Popeye Doyle, the rumpled New York detective chasing international drug dealers in director William Friedkin’s thriller The French Connection, that assured his stardom and a best actor Academy Award.
He also won a best supporting actor Oscar in 1993 as a mean sheriff in the Clint Eastwood western Unforgiven, and was nominated for an Academy Award for his turn as an FBI agent in the 1988 historical drama Mississippi Burning.
Hackman could come across on the screen as menacing or friendly, working with a face that he described to the New York Times in 1989 as that of “your everyday mine worker.”
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