Actor. Born on January 30, 1931, in San Bernardino, California. Character star of Hollywood films. The son of a journeyman pressman, he was raised in Danville, Illinois and at 16 dropped out of school to join the Marines. Discharged after three years of service, he moved to New York and for two years drifted from job to job, driving a truck, jerking sodas, selling shoes and working as a doorman at a Times Square restaurant. He later used the GI Bill to study commercial drawing, then journalism and TV production, and for a period moved across the country from one small town to another, holding temporary jobs as floor manager or assistant director in small TV stations. Finally, in his early 30's, he decided to realize a lifelong dream to become an actor. He attended the Pasadena Playhouse school in California and, after returning to New York, began getting small roles in summer stock, off Broadway and TV.
Hackman's big break came in 1964 when he landed the lead part opposite Sandy Dennis in the Broadway comedy "Any Wednesday". This led to a brief but memorable scene in the film "Lilith" (1964). That film's star, Warren Beatty, remembered Hackman when he was casting Bonnie and Clyde three years later and hired him to portray Clyde's brother, Buck. Hackman's performance in that role brought him his first Academy Award nomination. He picked up another nomination for I Never Sang for My Father (1970) and finally won the coveted Oscar for his performance in the role with which he has remained most closely identified, that of obsessive, brutish narcotics copy Popeye Doyle in The French Connection (1971). A superb, intuitive actor with an uncanny capacity to capture average characters down to their most minute emotional detail, Hackman followed this triumph with several other superlative true-to-life performances, most memorably in The Conversation (1974). Later, demonstrating remarkable versatility, he flaunted comic skills in Superman (1978) and its sequels. But his mainstay remained drama, and after hammering out one strong performance after another, he won the Best Actor prize at the Berlin Film Festival and a fourth Oscar nomination for Mississippi Burning (1988). In 1992, he captured a second Oscar for his best supporting actor performance in Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood's heralded western. An average-looking man in late middle age, Hackman seems unlikely star material. But by consistently evoking varieties of every man in his roles, he is one of the busiest, most sought-after screen personalities in Hollywood—and one of the highest paid. One critic aptly described him as "the finest journeyman actor in American cinema today".
