Fametracker
 
Gene Hackman starred in no fewer than five movies in 2001, which
raises the question: when is Gene Hackman not starring in movies?
It seems that hardly a month goes by in which he's not barking at his
underlings or pissing off his superiors in some movie trailer or other.
Hackman's quintuple-play last year raised his career count to an
impressive grand total of seventy-nine films -- or roughly one movie for
every year that he's been on this earth. (He'll turn seventy-two this
month.) When you consider that he was thirty-seven years old when
he landed his first major role -- as Buck Barrow, Clyde's brother, in
1967's Bonnie & Clyde -- and a relatively ancient forty-one when his
turn as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection won him an Oscar
and made him a star, Hackman's prodigiousness seems all the more
impressive.
What's really impressive, however, is that Hackman -- through talent,
or luck, or a bit of both -- has managed to thwart the ecology of Hollywood.
Generally speaking, there are two types of male movie actors: the stars
and the stalwarts. Gene Hackman, perhaps alone among living actors,
has made himself into both.
The star, of course, is the guy who gets his face on the poster and his
name over the title. He is the movie's centre of gravity, and everything
else -- danger, bad guys, the mysterious briefcase, the beautiful widow
-- is pulled into his orbit. He gets the girl. He diffuses the bomb. He takes
his shirt off, and the audience swoons.
The stalwart, on the other hand, is familiar but not famous -- the kind of
actor that we, here at Fametracker, like to refer to as "Hey! It's That Guy!"
(For about 426 examples of said actors, please refer to the "Hey! It's That
Guy!" section.) This is the kind of actor whose face you know but whose
name you can't place. He (or sometimes she) is the cop, the coach, the
soldier, the senator, and sometimes even the president. He's the loyal
partner who gets offed in the film's second act, spurring the star (who's
already turned in his badge and been tossed off the force) to suit up and
get serious about revenge. The stalwart never gets the girl; he never
diffuses the bomb (he might take a stab at it, but he'll always end up fried);
and he does little to make audiences swoon. Yet he's essential to
Hollywood's ecosystem, working steadily and stealthfully, enjoying a
kind of anonymous fame.
Most actors can be placed in one or the other of these two categories.
The stars, for obvious reasons, hardly need to be identified -- they are
the omnipresent personalities: the Pitts, the Cruises, the Gibsons, the
Fords.
The stalwarts, on the other hand, are hard to identify, because it's by
their faces, not their names, that we know them -- and even then, they're
only vaguely familiar, like a cousin once met at a wedding. They are
actors like Jeffrey Jones, Joe Don Baker, George Dzundza, the late,
great J.T. Walsh, or Senator Fred Thompson, a former lawyer from
Tennessee who spent several years playing lawyers, senators, and CIA
bureaucrats in films such as No Way Out, The Hunt for Red October,
and In the Line of Fire, before successfully running for the real-life Senate
in 1994.
The advantage of being a star is clear -- you're a star. The disadvantage
is that you have a limited shelf life, in that once you reach the age at
which you can no longer plausibly get the girl -- who is now nearly young
enough to be your granddaughter -- you must gracefully retire, unless
you are Michael Douglas. Your paycheques are large, but your earning
years are limited, and you're unlikely to headline five movies a year unless
you have really bad judgment or really large debts. (In the case of John
Travolta, it's unclear what factor drives his ill-advised ubiquity, but the
detrimental effects are there for all to see.)
The advantage of being a stalwart is that you work...a lot. Because stars
can't exist on their own -- they need people to befriend, avenge, or foil the
nefarious plots of -- there will always be a call for the stalwarts. Jeffrey
Jones, a consummate stalwart who's perhaps best remembered as the
bedeviled principal in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, also appeared in five movies
last year, and has had forty-three film and TV roles since 1982.
The disadvantage of being a stalwart is that, while you no doubt live well,
you'll earn neither the monetary nor adulatory benefits of true celebrity.
As such, these actors -- and there are dozens of them, milling around
crime scenes and unpacking attachés at CIA briefings -- are the Hollywood
equivalent of session musicians. They play backup.
Except, of course, for Gene Hackman. Hackman manages to straddle
these worlds, reaping the advantages of both. Like a star, his name and
face are famous and his paycheques formidable, but like a stalwart,
he works, constantly and consistently, with no apparent dampening effect
on the public's appetite for his presence. In fact, rather than shunning
subsidiary roles, he's embraced the providence of the stalwart -- the
soldier, the senator, the coach, the cop. Of course, it helps that he can
play these parts better than anyone else out there; there are few thrills in
modern cinema more satisfying than the sight of Gene Hackman losing
his temper. Whether low and coiled or at a rolling boil, Hackman has more
shades of anger than most actors have shades, period.
Armed with these skills, Hackman has settled into the comfortable rhythm
of the stalwart character actor. The gruff but honourable general he plays in
Behind Enemy Lines, for example, is strikingly similar to the sub captain he
played in 1995's Crimson Tide, or the colonel be played in 1988's Bat 21.
Similarly, the tough yet fair football coach he played in last year's The
Replacements was a gridiron echo of the basketball coach he played in
1986's Hoosiers, and the charming but corrupt defense secretary he played
in 1987's No Way Out was promoted, ten years later, to a charming but corrupt
President in Absolute Power.
In fact, with a few exceptions, Hackman now plays essentially two different
roles: menacing authoritarians who turn out to be softies, and menacing
authoritarians who turn out to be even more loathsome than you originally
suspected. He's equally adept at both, as evidenced by an Oscar nomination
for his good-hearted FBI man in Mississippi Burning and an Oscar statue for
his vile sheriff in 1992's Unforgiven. Both roles were variations on parts he's
played, or would play, in other films; he did a lazy rehash of Unforgiven's
satanic lawman three years later in The Quick and the Dead.
Onscreen, Hackman rarely expends more energy than is necessary -- in
movies such as Absolute Power or Wyatt Earp, he gives the impression that
he arrived on the set that morning, gave his lines a quick once-over, then
polished off his scenes in one take, while his driver kept the motor running in
the limo. But like a prize-fighter who dispatches bums and top contenders with
equal efficiency, Hackman is never less than serviceable in even the most
forgettable films -- yet still has enough in reserve to deliver a knockout
performance when the opportunity presents itself, as it did in the recent The
Royal Tenenbaums, for which he has just been awarded a Best Actor Golden
Globe (As Spy magazine's Walter Monheit might have said, "Gene's no hack,
man! If he doesn't get the 'Royal' treatment from Oscar, there's no justice in
Tinseltown! Oof!" ) And even when Hackman coasts through a film on autopilot,
he reliably outshines everyone else in the cast, like a veteran fencer who promises
to fight everyone one-handed, and does, and bests the whole lot.
As such, Hackman may seem like a star, but in fact he's a kind of super-stalwart
-- the type of actor who, in a just universe, would be the rule and not a singular
exception. Stars often gripe that they wish they could forego the publicity-related
demands of their celebrity and focus on "the work" -- yet there they are, month
after month, squinting out from magazine covers or embroiling us in their carefully
orchestrated offscreen escapades. Hackman, on the other hand, doesn't talk wistfully
about the work; he simply does it, and does it well, in role after role after role.
Of course, Hackman is plenty famous already -- and one of the best things about
him is that he doesn't much seem to care either way. (Say what you will about the
man, but you'll never catch him in the pages of People with Lara Flynn Boyle on his
arm.) Still, we feel -- as you may now have intuited --that he deserves a bit of a top-up.
Like when the waiter brings you a milkshake, then gives you the metal cylinder with
that little extra in it, which you feel like you're getting for free. Hackman had a busy
and productive year, and deserves a year-end bonus as much as anyone.
The Hollywood engine -- and the larger celebrity machine -- will always be fueled by
star power, but it's the stalwarts who often give moviegoers their greatest satisfactions.
(Even in a throwaway effort like Breakdown, a 1997 formula horror flick starring Kurt
Russell, there is pleasure to be found in the great J.T. Walsh's slick and venomous
villain.) In Gene Hackman, the star with the soul of a stalwart, these unsung actors
have found their patron saint.

Assets/Liabilities
• For a seventy-nine-film résumé, he's got surprisingly few clunkers
• Never appears on Access Hollywood bitching about how hard it is to live a private
life. Instead, just lives a private life
• How many men do you think can scream and spit and cuss and carry on like Gene
Hackman can, and still have eyes that can legitimately be called "twinkly"?• We said surprisingly few clunkers, not surprisingly none. Namely, Absolute Power
• Reportedly not hesitant to...er, contribute his opinion on set, especially with junior
directors
• Can never be accused of being an aging pretty boy since he's looked fifty-five since
the day he landed in Hollywood, God love him
 
  http://www.fametracker.com/fame_audit/hackman_gene.php


GO BACK TO THE ARTICLES MAIN PAGE