The star of every scene he was in, he became the gold standard of characterful acting with heft

He always seemed to be wiry, tough and in his 40s or 50s... It doesn't make sense to call him unassuming when his presence was so potent

- Peter Bradshaw

As the movie ends, our point of view pans relentlessly like a security camera across the trashed apartment. It has been ripped apart in a doomed attempt to find the bugging device spying on the guy who lives there. With every sweep, the man is seen in the corner, playing the sax.

Gene Hackman's performance as surveillance expert Harry Caul in Francis Coppola's paranoid conspiracy drama The Conversation (1974) was a jewel in his career. Caul is a pro eavesdropper who becomes obsessed with a conversation he records for a mysterious client that, to his horror, reveals a murder plot. The film turns on some variants of intonation and pitch that Harry doesn't understand until too late.

Hackman's death marks the end of one of the greatest periods of US cinema: the American new wave. He was the gold standard for this era, ever since Warren Beatty gave him his big break with the role of Buck Barrow in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

He was the character actor who was really a star; in fact the star of every scene he was in. He wasn't gorgeous like Redford or dangerously sexy like Nicholson, or even puckish like Hoffman; Hackman was normal, but his normality was supercharged.