page_title: Gene Hackman
section_title: 1970s
hierarchical_section_title: Gene Hackman / Career / 1970s
caption_attribution_description: English: Newspaper interview photo of Gene Hackman
context_page_description: Eugene Allen Hackman is a retired American actor and novelist. In a career that spanned more than six decades, Hackman won two Academy Awards, four Golden Globes, one Screen Actors Guild Award, and two BAFTAs.
  Nominated for five Academy Awards, Hackman won Best Actor for his role as Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle in the critically acclaimed thriller The French Connection, and Best Supporting Actor as "Little" Bill Daggett in the Clint Eastwood Western Unforgiven. His other nominations for Best Supporting Actor came with the films Bonnie and Clyde and I Never Sang for My Father, with a second Best Actor nomination for Mississippi Burning.
  Hackman's other major film roles included The Poseidon Adventure, The Conversation, French Connection II, A Bridge Too Far, Superman: The Movie —as arch-villain Lex Luthor, Hoosiers, The Firm, The Quick and the Dead, Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State, Antz, The Replacements, Behind Enemy Lines, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Welcome to Mooseport —his final film role before retirement.
context_section_description: Hackman was nominated for a second Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his role in I Never Sang for My Father (1970). He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as New York City Detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle in The French Connection (1971), marking his graduation to leading-man status.
  He followed this with leading roles in the disaster film The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974), which was nominated for several Oscars. That same year, Hackman appeared, in what would become one of his most famous comedic roles, as The Blindman in Young Frankenstein.
  He appeared as one of Teddy Roosevelt's former Rough Riders in the Western horse-race saga Bite the Bullet (1975). He reprised his Oscar winning role as Doyle in the sequel French Connection II (1975), and was part of an all-star cast in the war film A Bridge Too Far (1977), playing Polish General Stanisław Sosabowski. Hackman showed a talent for both comedy and the "slow burn" as criminal mastermind Lex Luthor in Superman: The Movie (1978), a role he would reprise in its 1980 and 1987 sequels.
caption: Hackman in 1972
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