Through no fault of his own, Gene Hackman looks like a sadistic character.
But his meatiness, in appearance and performance, has made him a big star in a business where being just another pretty face is not enough.
It`s no coincidence that David Webb People`s script for ”Unforgiven,” a hugely successful revisionist Western film about real men, was sent to Hackman by two directors: Francis Ford Coppola several years ago and Clint Eastwood more recently.
Eastwood correctly saw Hackman as someone who could be his worthy antagonist in ”Unforgiven.” But Hackman doesn`t see the character he plays, Sheriff Little Bill Daggett, as the villain.
”I think the villain of the piece is the violence,” Hackman says. ”I think my character was a fairly simple-minded guy in terms of what he thought was right. He was a fascist, certainly. That`s why he was so stunned in the end. He felt he had done all the right things.”
Hackman only agreed to do ”Unforgiven” because he felt it says something negative about violence, showing it to be repulsive rather than appealing.
He had already turned down ”The Silence of the Lambs,” even before discussions about whether he`d play Hannibal Lecter or the FBI director.
”The reason I didn`t do it is that my children had asked me not to do so many violent films and I really started thinking about that,” he says, ”that I had involved myself in a lot of violence.
”I have a lot of feelings about the films that I`ve done. Not regret so much-there are a couple of films I probably shouldn`t have done. But you take what`s offered early in your career. Unfortunately you establish yourself as being able to do certain kinds of things.
”It`s very difficult to break out of that because in filmmaking they cast so close to type.”
Hackman, 61, came to Hollywood from Danville, Ill., by way of the Marines, radio announcing and the New York stage. He was a classmate of Dustin Hoffman`s at the Pasadena Playhouse.
It`s said they were the two students notable for being least likely to succeed. They roomed together in New York in the `50s, trying to break into show business. Hackman says ”it was a lot more fun then,” meaning life and art and probably New York.
He married in 1956, divorced in 1985, and has three children born in the
`60s. They`re the ones who don`t like violence in the movies.
Moviegoers may be shocked to know that he hasn`t always been a sadistic character, or even a tough guy. In 1964, he won rave reviews for playing an earnest young businessman and Sandy Dennis` suitor in the hit play ”Any Wednesday.”
Last winter, Hackman returned to Broadway in ”Death and the Maiden,” a drama directed by Mike Nichols about three people in an unnamed, post-revolutionary Latin American country. He played a cultured, congenial upstanding citizen accused by his hostess of once being her torturer during a political interrogation.
Hackman spent most of his time on stage bound to a chair while Glenn Close emoted and Richard Dreyfuss ameliorated.
”We felt it was going to be triumphal and pleasurable,” he says, ”and it turned out to be a lot of hard work and terrible reviews.”
His greatest success has come on the big screen in roles that make much of his surface ordinariness and underlying potential for explosiveness and malice.
After 30 years, being a movie actor is still a thrill for Hackman, but, he says, ”It`s a different kind of thrill than you might imagine.
”Going to openings and award ceremonies and fancy houses is not as much fun as actually doing the acting. The thrill of making a scene work as an actor is all I`ve ever really wanted to do.”
