Gene Hackman and wife Betsy Arakawa found dead at home with their dog

The police said it is currently an active investigation but they do not believe that foul play was a factor at this time

Thu, 27 Feb, 2025 - 08:48

Benjamin Lee, Catherine Shoard and Naomi Clarke

Oscar-winning American actor Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa have been found dead in their home in New Mexico in the US.

The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office confirmed the couple had been found dead on Wednesday afternoon in their Santa Fe home.

In an interview on Wednesday evening, County Sheriff Adan Mendoza said there was no immediate indication of foul play. He did not provide a cause of death or say when the couple might have died.

Hackman, 95, had lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, since the 1980s and married Arakawa, 63, in 1991.

Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the couple’s home in a gated community called Old Sunset Trail on Wednesday afternoon to investigate the deaths of two elderly people and a dog. It was unclear whether the deputies were responding to a report of the deaths or if they were making a welfare check at the home.

The deputies discovered the bodies of a man in his 90s and a woman in her 60s, Mendoza initially reported.

“All I can say is that we’re in the middle of a preliminary death investigation, waiting on approval of a search warrant,” the sheriff said Wednesday evening before his agency had positively identified the pair.

“I want to assure the community and neighbourhood that there’s no immediate danger to anyone,” he said.

This January 19, 2003 file photo shows actor Gene Hackman at the 60th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif.

Hackman enjoyed a 40-year career in film, including performances in The French Connection, Superman and The Royal Tenenbaums, before he retired in 2004. He achieved success relatively late, breaking through in his 30s and going on to embody the antiheroic men of 1970s Hollywood.

Born in 1930, he joined the Marines in the late 1940s, and decided to study acting in the late 1950s. Hackman befriended Dustin Hoffman at the Pasadena Playhouse and the two were voted “the least likely to succeed”. With various bit parts on TV and stage under his belt, Hackman made his big screen debut opposite Warren Beatty in the melodrama Lilith in 1964.

Three years later, Hackman made his first real impression with another role alongside Beatty. Playing Buck Barrow in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, he secured his first Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. He lost to George Kennedy in Cool Hand Luke but it led to his first leading role in 1970’s I Never Sang For My Father with Melvyn Douglas.

However, Hackman struggled with the father-son relationship drama.

“I didn’t think a lot of the project and was taking it very lightly,” Hackman said in a 2002 interview with the Guardian.

“Then Melvyn Douglas came up to me and said, ‘Gene, you’ll never get what you want with the way you’re acting’ and he didn’t mean acting – he meant that I was not behaving myself. He taught me not to use my reservations as an excuse for not doing the work.”

The advice helped to craft a performance that gave Hackman his second Oscar nomination. The following year he took the lead in William Friedkin’s action thriller The French Connection and graduated to the A-list, thanks to the film’s box office success. Hackman won his first Oscar for best actor for his role as Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle.

“Film-making has always been risky — both physically and emotionally — but I do choose to consider that film a moment in a checkered career of hits and misses,” Hackman said in a 2021 interview.

Actor Gene Hackman with wife Betsy Arakawa in June 1993. Picture: AP Photo, File

Hackman had further success in the 70s with roles in The Poseidon Adventure and A Bridge Too Far, and also displayed a talent for comedy with acclaimed turns in Young Frankenstein and Superman, playing the superhero’s nemesis Lex Luthor in the latter.

But his best work of the decade could be found in films that few went to see: Arthur Penn’s mystery noir Night Moves, Jerry Schatzberg’s road movie Scarecrow and Francis Ford Coppola’s Palme d’Or-winning conspiracy thriller The Conversation. During the same period, he also turned down roles in Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

During the 80s, he continued to play Lex Luthor in the Superman sequels and also starred in Reds, Hoosiers and No Way Out. He also picked up another Oscar nomination for Mississippi Burning before winning his second Oscar in 1992 for a role in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. The same decade also saw him in The Firm, Crimson Tide and The Birdcage.

Hackman also started his second career as an author of historical fiction with his first book Wake of the Perdido Star, which was followed by four others, the most recent of which was published in 2011.

Actor Gene Hackman discussing the effect of an Academy Award nomination on his career, March 24, 1972.

Hackman’s later film roles included acclaimed comic turns in Heartbreakers and The Royal Tenenbaumsand thrillers such as Heist and Runaway Jury. His final film was the 2004 comedy Welcome to Mooseport. In 2008, he confirmed his retirement.

“The straw that broke the camel’s back was actually a stress test that I took in New York,” Hackman said to Empire about his retirement.

“The doctor advised me that my heart wasn’t in the kind of shape that I should be putting it under any stress.” Hackman went on to narrate two documentaries: The Unknown Flag Raiser of Iwo Jima in 2016 and We, the Marines in 2017. He also co-wrote three historical fiction novels with Daniel Lenihan before writing two solo efforts, the most recent of which was called Pursuit, a crime thriller.

When asked in a 2011 interview, how he would describe his life, he said: “‘He tried.’ I think that’d be fairly accurate.”