G ene Hackman joked that he was “at least seventh choice” to play Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in The French Connection. After years of struggle and misfortune, the role of the gritty New York detective won him an Oscar at the age of 41 – and made him a star.

Hackman, who celebrates his 90th birthday on 30 January, had a remarkable career, spanning 85 movies and acclaimed roles in television and on stage. Yet success came only after numerous crushing disappointments. Many aspiring actors would have given up, but tough former marine Hackman said he held on to his conviction that “I wasn’t going to let any f***ers get me down”.

The actor, born Eugene Alden Hackman in San Bernardino, California, in 1930, learnt resilience at just 13. His father walked out on their family for good. “He always went too far, laid it on pretty heavy,” recalled Hackman of his dad, who operated a newspaper printing press and believed in corporal punishment. Things came to a head in 1943, after the family had been forced to relocate to Denville, Illinois, and live with grandparents.

The fateful day Hackman’s father abandoned his family remained forever etched into Hackman’s mind. The actor often talked in later life about the “hurt and disappointment” of the memory of his father waving from the car as he drove past him on the street. “That wave, it was like he was saying, ‘OK, it’s all yours. You’re on your own, kiddo’,” Hackman recalled in The New York Times Magazine 46 years later. He drew on the emotions of that fateful day in his career, quipping that “dysfunctional families have sired a number of pretty good actors”.

The 40 best films of the decade Show all 40 1 /40 The 40 best films of the decade The 40 best films of the decade 40. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood A helter-skelter ride of a movie, satirical, very witty and showing its director’s immense affection for the B-movie actors, stunt men and hangers on who make up its cast. It’s also a tribute to Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Who would have believed that a film set just as the Sixties in LA turned sour could be so uplifting? Geoffrey Macnab Sony/Columbia/Rex The 40 best films of the decade 39. The Master The world isn’t scared enough of Scientology, but perhaps it would be if enough people had seen The Master. Paul Thomas Anderson depicts (a fictionalised version of) the cult as a trap for bruised masculinity. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix contort themselves into primitive creatures of greed and desire. It’s an ugly film, in the very best sense of the word. Clarisse Loughrey Snap Stills/Rex The 40 best films of the decade 38. The Irishman Scorsese summons all his sad captains for one last reunion in his magisterial gangster epic. De Niro, Pesci, Keitel and (newcomer) Pacino are all cast in a film as much about friendship, memory and betrayal as it is about corruption in the Teamster union or Mafia violence. GM Netflix via AP The 40 best films of the decade 37. Inside Out This is Pixar’s boldest and strangest animated feature. It takes us deep inside the mind of its heroine, 11-year-old Riley, where her unconscious is shown as akin to a magical theme park; emotions like Joy and Sadness feature as characters. Director Pete Docter deals with complex subject matter in a lithe and inventive way, and without too many Freudian hang ups. GM Moviestore/Rex The 40 best films of the decade 36. Shoplifters Hirokazu Kore-eda is like the Charles Dickens of contemporary Japanese cinema. He tells melodramatic family stories which would seem mawkish if they weren’t so brilliantly observed. Winner of the Palme D’Or in Cannes, this is one of his very best movies – a heart-tugging story about impoverished members of a makeshift family doing everything they can to survive. GM Thunderbird Releasing The 40 best films of the decade 35. Dogtooth Dogtooth is a grim tale of isolation, incest, cat murder and DIY dentistry. But Yorgos Lanthimos has a hidden superpower up his sleeve: the more off-putting his films, the more you get drawn in. His work breeds curiosity. We want to solve the mystery of these strange worlds and their cold, inscrutable characters. The fact that there are no answers keeps us coming back for more. GM Feelgood Entertainment The 40 best films of the decade 34. Edge of Seventeen Kelly Fremon Craig’s gorgeous if cruelly unrecognised The Edge of Seventeen is deliberately small in plot, with Hailee Steinfeld playing a grumpy teen horrified to discover her best friend is dating her older brother. But it is told with heartwarming urgency, reflective of the heightened, dizzying drama of merely being a teenager. Moviestore/Rex The 40 best films of the decade 33. A Quiet Passion Reclusive New England poet Emily Dickinson, who published only a handful of poems during her lifetime, is brought to life in vivid fashion by actress Cynthia Nixon in Terence Davies’s biopic. She may look like a spinster aunt but Nixon shows us her passion, mischief and her eccentric brilliance. Music Box Films The 40 best films of the decade 32. Frances Ha Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha is the definitive film about the quarter-life crisis, largely because it embraces the messiness of it all. We get the ups and the downs. We get the poorly-planned trip to Paris made by a young woman desperate to experience something profound. It’s a film without many dramatic conflicts, but marked by a gentle push towards accepting the inevitability of change. IFC Films The 40 best films of the decade 31. The Revenant Famous for its scene of Leonardo Di Caprio being mauled by a bear, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s western is part survival drama, part revenge movie. It’s a wilderness tale on the very grandest scale. From the opening massacre to the snowbound denouement, it if full of moments that startle you with their violence and their beauty. GM 20th Century Fox The 40 best films of the decade 30. Boyhood Shot over 12 years, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is the ultimate coming-of-age movie. It follows main character Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from when he is seven years old until he is a young adult. It’s a testament to the patience and ingenuity of Linklater and to the exceptional work of his cast (including Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke) that the film never feels phoney. GM Sundance Institute The 40 best films of the decade 29. Hereditary The horrors of Ari Aster’s occult contraption are matched only by the sheer volume of ideas crammed into it. A devastating kaleidoscope of stark images, mischievous easter eggs and pure, guttural horror, Hereditary asks a staggering amount of star Toni Collette, who wails and groans and weeps, as if conveying a full-body demolition in painful slow-motion. It is a performance for the ages in one of the best films in recent memory. A24 The 40 best films of the decade 28. Melancholia Kirsten Dunst is remarkable as a bride in the grips of mental illness shortly before the world ends. She conveys like few before her the surging apathy and bottomless self-loathing of depression, where everything, be it food or otherwise, tastes like ashes. The film that surrounds her is equally awe-inducing, distilling with grim elegance all of Lars von Trier’s polarising genius. AW Canal+ The 40 best films of the decade 27. Selma Selma is a masterclass in the historical biopic. Presenting a crucial moment in Martin Luther King Jr’s life without dramatic embellishment or emotional manipulation, it lets his legacy speak for itself, as Ava DuVernay wields her camera like a weapon of truth. Unabashedly political in its approach, Selma speaks plainly to the fact that society cannot pave its future without first understanding its past. CL Paramount/Rex The 40 best films of the decade 26. Boy Taika Waititi’s films always end with the feeling that things will work themselves out. It’s not blind optimism, but something far more comforting – he believes deeply in people’s ability to weather even the worst of storms. This is most apparent in Boy, still his best film to date, which catalogues a young Maori boy’s dawning realisation that his absent father isn’t the hero he imagines him to be. CL Transmission Films The 40 best films of the decade 25. Dunkirk British stoicism and grace under-fire are foregrounded in Christopher Nolan’s epic film about the Dunkirk evacuations. Nolan has a Cecil B De Mille-like genius for orchestrating crowd scenes and working with huge ensemble casts. He combines spectacle with very intimate moments that show the quiet desperation of the soldiers stranded on a French beach with little chance of escape. Warner Bros The 40 best films of the decade 24. Her Her felt almost uncomfortably relevant upon its release in 2013, and even more so today. Not because it shows people falling in love with artificially intelligent operating systems voiced by Scarlett Johansson, which hasn’t exactly caught on (...yet), but for what it said about modern loneliness. It is a sparse, oddly human film, Joaquin Phoenix finding solace and romantic fulfilment in sparkly new technology, before everything falls apart. AW Warner Bros The 40 best films of the decade 23. Call Me by Your Name Luca Guadagnino’s wonderfully evocative coming-of-age drama, set over a long, lazy Italian summer sometime in the 1980s, is notable for its frank but delicately observed account of the love affair between the precocious adolescent Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and the American academic, Oliver (Armie Hammer), who becomes part of the household. GM Warner Bros The 40 best films of the decade 22. Anomalisa It may be animated but few live-action films have captured middle-aged male angst and disillusionment as well as Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa. David Thewlis’s exceptional voice work brings an extra, sardonic edge to its portrayal of the businessman on a work trip to Cincinnati. Kaufman captures the man’s vulnerability, boredom and creeping disappointment about the course his life has taken. GM Paramount Pictures The 40 best films of the decade 21. The Social Network Described upon release as a lightly fictionalised account of the birth of Facebook, and as “hurtful” by Mark Zuckerberg himself, The Social Network was always spectacular, but its lessons have only deepened with time. It now resembles a terrifying warning about privacy, power, misogyny and the dangers of the internet, brought to life by David Fincher’s irresistibly cool direction, a characteristically snappy script by Aaron Sorkin and the dreamy, pulsating score by the now-ubiquitous Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It remains the most important film of the decade. AW Columbia The 40 best films of the decade 20. Black Swan It’s important to occasionally remind yourself that Black Swan, a bonkers, uncompromising and horrifying ballet thriller, somehow grossed $329m at the box office. But even removed from its staggering financial success, Darren Aronofsky’s psychological creepshow is a creative triumph. Part Showgirls, part Polanski and all Perfect Blue, it flirts with camp, Cronenbergian body horror and shaky-cam intimacy, with the deservedly Oscar-winning Natalie Portman as the twirling, crumbling creature at its centre. AW Moviestore/Shutterstock The 40 best films of the decade 19. Roma Roma takes two stories – one heartwrenching and intimate, the other sweeping and political – and weaves them together so delicately that they become one. It’s a tribute to the domestic worker who director Alfonso Cuarón says raised him. But it’s also the story of Mexico’s history, as seen through the perspective of those who have, for so long, been left voiceless. This is Cuarón’s masterpiece. CL Carlos Somonte The 40 best films of the decade 18. The Act of Killing It feels remarkable, given how easy it is to turn away from evil, that The Act of Killing exists at all. Not only did Joshua Oppenheimer choose one of the perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide as his subject of his documentary, but he had him confront his own crimes through a series of cinematic reenactments. It is profoundly disturbing to watch. CL Dogwoof The 40 best films of the decade 17. Stoker Park Chan-Wook’s twisted homage to Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt may be filled with beautiful things, but they’re laced with venom. When India (Mia Wasikowska) receives a visit from her enigmatic Uncle Charlie, she discovers they share a perverse kinship. Are they the same soul in two different bodies, or are they merely bound together by the stench of death that follows them wherever they go? CL Rex Features The 40 best films of the decade 16. The Selfish Giant Like Ken Loach’s Kes, Clio Barnard’s Bradford-set tale, very loosely inspired by the Oscar Wilde story, combines lyricism with polemic. It captures brilliantly the mischief and resourcefulness of its two young protagonists (teenage kids excluded from school) while laying bare the brutality of the society in which they and their families are cast adrift. GM Rex Features The 40 best films of the decade 15. Son of Saul In 'Son of Saul' Geza Rohrig plays a Hungarian-Jewish prisoner tasked with the extermination of his fellow Jews Sony Pictures Entertainment The 40 best films of the decade 14. Lady Bird Lady Bird – and its story of a frustrated teen (Saoirse Ronan) trapped in Sacramento, California – is deeply attuned to how we relate to memory. It’s less about particular events than the emotions they create: a flash of adolescent alienation, a tearful goodbye at the airport, or the sensation of seeing a familiar place through new eyes. A24 The 40 best films of the decade 13. The Grand Budapest Hotel Wes Anderson’s kitsch yarn, largely set in a luxurious spa hotel just before the Second World War, is an elegy for a lost world. Whether it’s Alexandre Desplat’s music, the eye-popping colours or the mannered but brilliant performances, all the elements here are perfectly judged. A film that could easily have seemed flimsy and conceited is instead utterly enrapturing. GM Moviestore/Rex The 40 best films of the decade 12. 12 Years a Slave Steve McQueen’s harrowing period drama confronts audiences with the reality of slavery. Racist white owners treat their slaves as if they’re livestock, not human beings. Chiwetel Ejiofor excels as Solomon Northup, the free man sold into slavery. The film has a furious polemical charge but also works as a terrifying Kafkaesque drama about a man who falls off the face of the world. GM Lionsgate The 40 best films of the decade 11. Under the Skin Scarlett Johansson tucking nervously into a slice of chocolate cake becomes one of cinema’s most humane and bittersweet moments courtesy of filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, whose once-in-a-blue-moon film projects have produced a trilogy of sinister classics. Like Sexy Beast and Birth before it, Under the Skin is a wild, beautiful pleasure, as haunting as it is tender and serenaded by a spindly, disquieting score by Mica Levi. AW Filmnation/Rex The 40 best films of the decade 10. 20th Century Women 20th Century Women is a small-scale comedy drama with the power of something bigger. A tapestry of restless lives figuring things out, it is about family, longing and feeling out of place. At its heart is Annette Bening, heartbreakingly empathetic as a woman out of time – too old for youthful bohemia and too young for her stuffy peers, and determined to raise her teenage son to be enlightened and brilliant. Rare is a fictional world so peacefully captivating. A24 The 40 best films of the decade 9. You Were Never Really Here Cinema is often at its most triumphant when it’s used as a tool for empathy, letting us climb into someone else’s brain and experience things that feel miles away from our own reality. That’s the revelatory power of Lynne Ramsay’s portrait of a PTSD-suffering vigilante, brought to life with incredible vulnerability by Joaquin Phoenix. Amazon Studios The 40 best films of the decade 8. Mad Max: Fury Road In a recent interview, Parasite director Bong Joon-ho revealed that he’d shed a tear while watching George Miller’s unexpected return to the Mad Max franchise. He called it “something we cannot describe with our words: all we can do is just cry”. He’s right. Fury Road is, essentially, a feature-length car chase – but it’s hard to put into words how epic and symphonic it truly is. CL Warner Bros The 40 best films of the decade 7. Paddington 2 A soothing balm for all of our socio-political ills, Paddington 2 is the film we needed more than any other this decade. There are numerous delights here, from the majesty of Paul King and Simon Farnaby’s script and its elaborate sleights of hand, to a moustache-twirling Hugh Grant at his most magnificent. But more than anything, Paddington 2 is about the healing power of community and family, a message conveyed with wholesome warmth and pluck by the achingly sweet bear of the title. Michael Bond would be proud. The 40 best films of the decade 6. American Honey It took a woman from Dartford to capture the sprawling, stirring power of the American road and all that it promises. Of all the decade’s films, Andrea Arnold’s American Honey feels the most hungry to exist independently on its own, ignoring the rules of storytelling and bursting at the seams with wildness and colour. Sasha Lane – who had never acted before she was spotted by Arnold on a beach during spring break – plays working-class teenager Star, who yearns for a greater purpose and hitches a ride with a truckful of kids as adrift as she is. AW Universal Pictures The 40 best films of the decade 5. Inside Llewyn Davis Inside Llewyn Davis is a kind of anti-Odyssey. In its story of a folk singer (Oscar Isaac) who hops from couch to couch, with no direction and few prospects, Llewyn becomes the weary Greek hero who not only struggles to find a way home, but realises he may not have a home to go to. It’s a deeply melancholic work. CBS Films The 40 best films of the decade 4. Phantom Thread Phantom Thread is a love story in a funhouse mirror – fizzy and feather-light, but with a barbed and kinky underbelly that could only have come from the mind of Paul Thomas Anderson. The bewitching duo of Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps play a fashion designer and his muse, who unearth new means to sustain their marriage. Anderson lingers over objects of beauty throughout – the lines of a fabric, the mess of a breakfast table, the colourful residue left over after the ball drops on New Year’s Eve. Apparently Day-Lewis’ final film, but what a blissful way to go out. AW Universal Pictures The 40 best films of the decade 3. Get Out Get Out sunk its teeth into culture in 2017, and hasn’t stopped biting. Jordan Peele’s horror satire is a polished, spooky and supremely well-executed chiller, but works even better as a deconstruction of race. In its sights are peak white centrism, the burdens and expectations of being black in America, and the untruths of the post-racial utopia many were fooled into embracing in the Obama era. No other film has reflected society in the 21st century more succinctly. AW Universal Pictures The 40 best films of the decade 2. Carol A magical reprieve from much of the queer romance canon, Carol is neither tragic nor sexually neutered, and is rich with snowy, expensive opulence. Todd Haynes’s 2015 masterpiece plays like a fairytale, kick-started by a misplaced pair of gloves, with Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara acting on feelings that were considered unacceptable at the time. Deeply romantic, sexy and dramatic, it takes everything Haynes perfected in his Douglas Sirk-inspired drama Far from Heaven (2002), and maximises it. The 40 best films of the decade 1. Moonlight Barry Jenkins is destined to be one of the most important cinematic voices of the era. Moonlight is ample proof of that: there are very few debuts that feel this transportive, that fill the screen with this much raw beauty and human vulnerability. The director knows the power of gesture, and so the film’s emotional weight rests on a few shared glances, or one hand placed gently on another. In the intersection between race, sexuality and class, it crafts tender poetry. CL David Bornfriend/Kobal/Rex

As a teenager, part of a single-parent family that moved about a lot, Hackman was frequently in trouble. He rowed with authority figures at Storm Lake High School in Iowa. He even spent a night in jail after stealing candy and a bottle of soda. His most peaceful times were when his movie-loving mother Anna took him to the cinema to watch his beloved James Cagney, a hobby that sowed the seeds of his future ambitions.

Hackman finally left school after a furious row with his basketball coach. After working for a brief spell in a steel mill, he lied about his age so he could join the Marine Corps at 16, “looking for adventure”. He spent four and a half years in the marines – serving in Japan and undergoing missions in China during Mao’s revolutionary years. His proclivity for trouble was not cured by wearing military uniform, however, and he got into trouble for brawling. “I have trouble with direction, because I just have always had trouble with authority,” he told Larry King in 2004. “I was not a good marine. I made corporal once and was promptly busted.”

Fate intervened just as his battalion was called up to fight in the Korean War. Hackman crashed a motorcycle into a tractor that had no lights, breaking his right leg, right shoulder and left knee and leaving him unfit for active service. After being discharged in 1952, Hackman spent six months studying journalism at the University of Illinois before dropping out. At the age of 22, he made his way to New York to try to be an actor, bolstered by the taste of show business he had sampled as a marine, when he had been a disc jockey and news announcer on Armed Forces Radio Service.

Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle in the 1975 sequel ‘French Connection II’ (Sky)

Hackman would later ruefully recall the dark days of his early twenties, scuffling around miserable jobs, and living at the YMCA in New York. He drove trucks, worked as a shop assistant at a drugstore (“customers treated you like crapola”), sold confectionery door to door, worked in an upmarket women’s shoe department (where he would slip expensive shoes to friends in exchange for a few dollars) and hauled furniture up high-rise apartments. The worst job, he said, was the night work at the Chrysler Building, polishing leather furniture.

What Hackman described as the “turning point” of his life came in 1955 when he was a doorman at a Times Square hotel. A marine sergeant who had been his drill instructor happened to walk past, dressed in his full colours. “He never looked at me but muttered, ‘Hackman, you’re a sorry son of a bitch’,” he told David Letterman. Hackman was “so embarrassed” by the way he was earning a living that he redoubled his efforts to make it as an actor.

Things began to change in 1956. On New Year’s Day, he married his girlfriend Fay Maltese, a bank secretary, and she encouraged him to pursue his dreams. They moved back to California, where Hackman enrolled at the Pasadena Playhouse Theatre’s acting school. “I was not considered one of their most promising students,” Hackman recalled drolly in a 1987 interview. He was putting it mildly.

At 26, he was more than five years older than most of his fellow students, whom he regarded as tanned young “walking surfboards”. Hackman, who was 6ft 2in, thought of himself as “big lummox kind of person”, talking self-deprecatingly about having the face of “your everyday mine worker”. His classmates did not rate him. The only person he liked was a small, 19-year-old oddball who strolled around in a suede vest and sandals. The rest of the class were hostile to him, too, calling him a “beatnik”. That friend was Dustin Hoffman.

With acting school pal Dustin Hoffman in the 2003 thriller ‘Runaway Jury’ (Rex)

The future Oscar winners bonded over their dislike of their fellow students. “Dustin was thought of as amusing and strange,” Hackman recalled in 1998. “I’d been in the Marine Corps for five years and was married – an equally unlikely candidate for movie stardom.” Hackman and Hoffman would escape their classmates by going up on to the roof of the theatre to play bongos.

The class alumni voted them both “Least Likely to Succeed”. Hackman was thrown out of the Playhouse after a year, having been awarded the lowest ever grade given there. In later years, he tended to frame these experiences in humorous terms, joking about failing to hear from his old classmates. In 2001, Hackman recalled that after his own acting career had started to take off, he had run into one former classmate who boasted about being in an episode of a TV drama called Blue Light. “And it’s gonna be repeated,” he told Hackman. Blue Light was axed in 1966 after only one season – the same time Hackman landed his first big film role in Bonnie and Clyde.

Being voted “Least Likely To Succeed” only fuelled Hackman’s determination. Back in New York, he began studying twice a week with George Morrison, a graduate of Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, who taught him about “method acting”, relaxation techniques, how to hone his timing and delivery and overcome his insecurities. “Gene never knew whether he was an actor,” Morrison told Vanity Fair in 2013. “He would have a part, and then go back to moving furniture.” Hackman did, however, take on board two fundamental questions Morrison said he should dwell on for every part: “How am I like this person?” and “How am I not like this person?”

The battle to get on to Broadway was arduous – “No one starts at the top in the theatre,” he said, “and the bottom is a very ugly place” – but he gradually began to get promising parts, making decent money for the first time. His biggest disappointment was that his mother, who died in 1962 when her burning cigarette ignited a fire in her home, was not around to see him fulfil his dreams. Even as an old man, Hackman would talk wistfully about a trip to the cinema with her, when she said she hoped “to see you do that someday”.

Estelle Parsons and Gene Hackman in 1967 crime film ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ (Sky)

In 1964, the year he appeared in the popular comedy stage show Any Wednesday, Hackman landed a role in Lilith, a movie with Warren Beatty. A couple of years later, Beatty recommended Hackman for the role of Buck Barrow, elder brother of the outlaw Clyde Barrow. Hackman’s performance in Bonnie and Clyde, which captured the anger and rebellion of Buck, won him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, although he lost out to Cool Hand Luke’s George Kennedy.

In his thirties, Hackman remained obsessive about improving his skills. He would wander around New York, endlessly watching people, absorbing their personalities and mannerisms. He also drew on emotions about the people close to him, admitting that he did so “in a very cold and clinical way”. Director Arthur Penn said Hackman was one of the best at exploiting the early pain in his life. “He’s one of the ones who are willing to plunge their arm into the fire as far as it can go,’’ said Penn, who directed Hackman in Bonnie and Clyde and Night Moves (1975).

There is a compelling scene in Clint Eastwood’s 1992 western Unforgiven, in which Hackman portrayed the sadistic Sheriff Daggett. Hackman’s character brutally beats a hired gunman called English Bob, played by Richard Harris. When asked how he found inspiration for this scene, he said he channelled anger over a snub from Harris. The pair had appeared together in the 1966 film Hawaii. “I could tell he didn’t remember having worked with me and he tried to fake his way through it,” Hackman told The New York Times in 2001. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I can use this.’ I just took that disappointment and did this kind of transference.” He won an Oscar for his performance.

Two decades earlier, as Popeye Doyle, Hackman had found having to be violent on screen so gruelling that he told French Connection director William Friedkin “he should consider replacing me”. But it is strange, given Hackman’s personal history of fights with strangers, that he had such qualms about slapping around a drug suspect on screen. Hoffman said that his friend would sometimes just announce, “I gotta go,” explaining to Variety that “he had to get in a fight. He’d go to some bar.”

Hackman as Sheriff Daggett in 1992 western ‘Unforgiven’ (Sky)

He was still getting into real-life violent altercations as an old man. In December 2001, a minor traffic accident in West Hollywood escalated into a fist fight with two men in broad daylight. “He brushed against me and I popped him,” Hackman told the Los Angeles Times. “Then the other guy jumped on me. We had this ugly wrestling match on the ground. The police came ... I got a couple of good shots in. The guy had me around the neck. That’s the ugly part. When you’re down on the ground and you’re nearly 72 years old.”

Hackman is truly a man of wild contradictions. Robert Duvall, who has been a friend since the 1950s, called him “a tormented guy, always into his own space, his own thing”. Where director Arthur Penn saw a man normally full of “great joie de vivre”, Morrison saw an inveterate “loner”. Hackman’s volatile bust-ups with directors on set earnt him the nickname “Vesuvius” – although he was forgiven for his temper tantrums. “There’s something very charismatic in him, even when he’s being his worst,” said Wes Anderson, who directed Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums.

The paradoxes of his life are plentiful. His political views were liberal; he was a lifelong Democrat voter who was proud of being listed as an “enemy” of President Nixon. Yet Hackman also loved arch conservative Ronald Reagan, saying: “I loved the idea of that man. He was so committed to a beautiful America.”

He is as happy talking about his beloved Jacksonville Jaguars football team as he is about art. Hackman started painting impressionist oil works in the 1950s, shortly after taking a class at the Art Students League Of New York. At the height of his fame, the Oscar winner steered clear of “shallow” Hollywood parties, preferring instead to spend his spare time stunt flying and deep-sea diving. In the late 1970s, Hackman drove in Sports Car Club of America races and even competed in a 24-hour sports car endurance test in a Toyota he shared with leading Japanese racer Masanori Sekiya.

Hackman with his ‘Unforgiven’ co-star and director Clint Eastwood at the 1993 Oscars (Rex)

Hackman’s hobbies, though, were always secondary to his devotion to his craft. His greatest roles – including his two films as Popeye Doyle and the monumental way he portrayed the drug-withdrawal scenes in French Connection II – have earnt him a stellar reputation among his peers. “Gene was simply the best actor I worked with,” said double Oscar winner Kevin Costner.

Hackman’s popular roles included playing sneering supervillain Lex Luthor in the Superman films, but the former stage actor always thrived on taking on challenging parts in movies, including playing a widowed college professor in 1970’s I Never Sang for My Father, a role that earnt him a Best Supporting Actor nomination. He was nominated again for his gripping portrayal of FBI agent Rupert Anderson in Mississippi Burning (1988), and is also saluted for major contributions to hit movies such as The Firm (1993), Get Shorty (1995), Enemy of the State (1998) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).

However, two of his finest roles came in films that had little commercial success. In the picaresque road movie Scarecrow (1973), which Hackman described as his favourite movie he worked on, he and Al Pacino played a pair of ex-con hobos who dream of opening a car wash. “It’s the only film I’ve ever made in absolute continuity, and that allowed me to take all kinds of chances and really build my character,” said Hackman.

Hackman had the ability to laugh at his own celebrity status at this time. He and Pacino prepared for Scarecrow by staying in costume and character while they spent time on the streets of San Francisco. Hackman told David Letterman about asking a muttering homeless man on Market Street the way to the nearest soup kitchen. The man gave them comprehensive directions. After they thanked him, in gruff voices, the homeless man smiled back and replied, “You’re welcome, Mr Hackman and Mr Pacino.”

Perhaps Hackman’s finest performance was as the bugging expert Harry Caul in The Conversation (1974). Finding out that he was second choice to Marlon Brando seemed to inspire him to even greater heights. The prescient script about illegal wire-tapping, written by director Francis Ford Coppola several years before Nixon’s Watergate scandal, reveals Hackman’s brilliance as a character actor, playing such a secretive, introverted man. “That was the pinnacle of my acting career in terms of character development,” Hackman said. “Caul was somewhat constipated. The character didn’t burst out. There was no satisfying cathartic moment in the film.”

As well as reaching dizzying heights in acclaimed movies, Hackman also admitted to Costner that he had taken many “questionable roles”, in substandard films such as The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Lucky Lady (1975), A Bridge Too Far (1977) and March or Die (1977). In the late 1970s and 1980s, Hackman also ran into problems with tax liabilities, joking that he had to borrow his daughter’s “piece-of-s***” car to get to interviews in Hollywood, having blown money on expensive motor vehicles, private planes and bad investments. “I was just barely hanging in, taking pretty much anything that was offered to me and trying to make it work,” he told interviewer Alysse Minkoff in 2000. He had also been left devastated when his best friend Norman Garey shot himself in 1981. Five years later, his troubled marriage to Faye, with whom he’d had three children, ended in divorce. It was a terrible time for Hackman, who admitted he was struggling to find the motivation to act.

It says everything for Hackman’s character and true greatness as an actor that he pulled himself together to make his award-winning appearance in 1988’s Mississippi Burning after such a troubled period. “He is incapable of bad work,” said the film’s director, Alan Parker. “Every director has a short list of actors he’d die to work with, and I’ll bet Gene’s on every one.”

Hackman has always been a voracious reader, and alongside his acting, he also carved out a career as the co-author of historical fiction. After bonding with his New Mexico neighbour and undersea archaeologist Daniel Lenihan – they shared a deep love for the books of Robert Louis Stephenson, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad and Jack London – the friends came up with the idea for a novel called Wake of the Perdido Star, a 19th-century sea adventure no less. They went on to write four more books, including a western thriller. Hackman says the hardest thing about writing fiction is the constant editing. “I like the loneliness of writing, actually. It’s similar in some ways to acting, but it’s more private and I feel like I have more control over what I’m trying to say and do.”

With Al Pacino in ‘Scarecrow’, the 1973 movie Hackman described as his favourite to work on (Rex)

Hackman retired from acting in 2004 after a final role in Welcome to Mooseport, a satire in which he played retired president Monroe “Eagle” Cole. As an older man, he found the acting business “very stressful” and was no longer willing to make “the compromises that you have to make in films”. He later joked that he would only take another movie role if it was filmed in his house.

Since then, aside from narrating a documentary called The Unknown Flag Raiser of Iwo Jima in 2016, Hackman has been content to live quietly in Santa Fe with his second wife Betsy Arakawa, a former classical pianist 32 years his junior. Despite heart concerns (Hackman had angioplasty surgery in the 1990s) and knee pains that are a legacy of that bike crash, the Hollywood star continues to get out and about on his bicycle. Even a collision in 2012 in Florida – when, with no helmet on, he was struck by a pick-up truck and injured – has not dampened his spirits. In January 2018, Bicycling.com reported that 88-year-old Hackman had bought a $2,800 e-bike, capable of travelling at 20mph, so he could ride around Santa Fe.

Celebrity worship has never been something Hackman wanted in his life. He says he is “not a sentimental guy” and does not keep movie memorabilia in his home – apart from a poster of Errol Flynn. He isn’t even sure what happened to his Oscar statues. “Maybe they’re packed somewhere,” he told the LA Times in 2001.

After retiring, Hackman was amused rather than angry when – unlike the homeless man in San Francisco in 1973 – a film crew in his home town failed to recognise him. “There was a young assistant director on a backstreet in Santa Fe, directing traffic,” he said in 2011. “I pulled up next to her and asked her if they were hiring any extras. She said, ‘No, I’m very sorry, sir.’”