Gene Hackman

Everyman leading man

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ACTORS WANT NOTHING MORE THAN for us to believe in them. But to watch Gene Hackman, who died in February at age 95, almost always meant wrestling with the feeling that no one or nothing could be trusted. He gravitated toward characters whose core of lies came wrapped in the truth, or vice versa. Either way, you had to keep an eye on him every millisecond, to detect infinitesimal shifts of feeling, sleight-of-hand elisions, a sly but peppery sense of humor that could hit you like the kickback on a shot of cheap single malt. His greatness is the kind you measure in molecules, the building blocks of everything.

Though he'd had small roles in movies and on television through the early 1960s, Hackman was 36 before anyone really took notice. In