Mystery grows over Gene Hackman death, bodies partially ‘mummified’
Mystery surrounds the death of Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa, who were found dead at their home with their beloved dog.
Officers found Hackman, 95, Arakawa, 64, and the pet dead when they performed a welfare check at their Santa Fe home around 1.45pm.
County Sheriff's deputies said they 'do not believe foul play was a factor in their deaths' but the 'exact cause of death has not been determined'.
Hackman and Arakawa were found in different rooms within the property. Their dog was found in a kennel, and two other family pets were found alive.
While police are yet to confirm how the pair died, Hackman's daughter has shared her theory that they were poisoned with carbon monoxide.
Hackman, a two-time Oscar winner with an estimated net worth of $80million, became something of a recluse in his final years and was rarely seen in public.
The actor was known to be fond of dogs, and rescued two stray German Shepherds that wandered into a stadium in Baltimore where they were filming scenes for The Replacements in 1999.
Hackman named one of the dogs Gene and the other Keanu, after his co-star Keanu Reeves. He later visited the animals in a shelter and adopted Gene after flying his own German Shepherds from New Mexico to see if they would get along.
Taking to X, one person claiming to be a vet said: 'I was on critical care late one night my senior year of veterinary school at Colorado State when Gene Hackman and his wife showed up with their elderly sick dog. They had driven eight hours to get the best care for their dog. He seemed like a pretty devoted dog lover to me.'
News of Hackman's death today prompted rumors about what had happened to the actor and his wife.
Assisted suicide is legal for the terminally-ill in New Mexico, although police have not yet given any guidance on their cause of death.
Hackman retired from acting in 2004. He packed up his things, left Los Angeles for a quiet life in New Mexico - and he never looked back.
Some initially thought that the surprising decision had to do with his marriage, but Hackman actually quit acting because of the severe stress he was under - which became too much to handle after he started to have issues with his heart.
'The straw that broke the camel's back was actually a stress test that I took in New York,' he said of his retirement in a 2009 interview. 'The doctor advised me that my heart wasn't in the kind of shape that I should be putting it under any stress.'
The former Marine appeared in more than 80 films, as well as on television and the stage during his lengthy career that started in the early 1960s.
The actor was first propelled into the spotlight when he starred in Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, and he went on to star in a slew of beloved movies and TV shows like Superman, The French Connection and Get Shorty, to name a few.
Hackman was married twice, most recently to 63-year-old classical pianist Arakawa. He had three children with his first wife Faye Maltese.
Last year, he and Arakawa were seen out and about for the first time in two decades.
Hackman was spotted holding onto his wife's arm for balance as the pair grabbed a bite at Pappadeaux's Seafood Kitchen in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Before the dinner date, Hackman enjoyed a cup of coffee and some apple pie from a local Speedway store.
The couple's outing marks the first time they were seen together in public for 21 years, with the last time being at the 2003 Golden Globe Awards, where he won the Cecil B. deMille award.
The legendary two-time Oscar winner and his long-time partner seemed to be in a good mood as they left the restaurant together.
He told Reuters in 2008: 'I haven't held a press conference to announce retirement, but yes, I'm not going to act any longer.'
'I've been told not to say that over the last few years, in case some real wonderful part comes up, but I really don't want to do it any longer.'
He also explained his passion for writing novels, saying 'I like the loneliness of it, actually. It's similar in some ways to acting, but it's more private and I feel like I have more control over what I'm trying to say and do.'
'There's always a compromise in acting and in film, you work with so many people and everyone has an opinion. … I don't know that I like it better than acting, it's just different. I find it relaxing and comforting.'
In 2011, he was asked by GQ if he would ever come out of retirement to do one more film, to which Hackman responded: 'If I could do it in my own house, maybe, without them disturbing anything and just one or two people.'
He has not stayed completely away from the industry, however, as he has narrated two Marine Corps documentaries: The Unknown Flag Raiser of Iwo Jima (2016) and We, The Marines (2017).
Born in California on January 30, 1930, the actor left school after a row with his baseball coach and, lying about his age, joined the US Marines aged 16 'looking for adventure'.
For the next four years, he served in post-war China and Japan as a field radio operator. His weakness for brawling got him into trouble to the extent that, after being promoted to corporal, he almost immediately lost his stripes.
He was discharged in 1952 after he was injured in a road accident.
After moving back to California following his military service, he decided to pursue acting after briefly living in New York.
As a child, Hackman particularly enjoyed his trips to the cinema with his mother.
After one of them, she told him she'd love to see his face one day up on the big screen – tragically, she never did although their visits instilled in him a passion to act.
He and his father used to spend their Saturdays together until his father chose a Saturday to walk out on the family. The 13-year-old had had no idea it was coming.
'That day, he drove by and waved at me and I knew from that wave that he wasn't coming back,' said Hackman.
'That wave, it was like he was saying, 'OK, it's all yours. You're on your own, kiddo'.'
Hackman, who said he frequently exploited the early pain in his life in his acting, once wryly observed that 'dysfunctional families have sired a number of pretty good actors'.
Hackman began his acting career nearly 70 years ago, joining the Pasadena Playhouse in 1956, where he befriended fellow aspiring actor Dustin Hoffman.
He eventually moved to New York in 1963 and began performing in several Off-Broadway plays and smaller TV roles.
The thespian truly made his name in the 1970s, when he was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Supporting Actor category for the 1970 flick, I Never Sang For My Father.
The following year he officially became a leading man, winning the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as New York City Detective Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle in The French Connection.
He went on to have consistent work, including in disaster film The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974) before landing the role of supervillain Lex Luthor in 1978's Superman: The Movie.
In the 1980s he starred in several films including Reds (1981), Under Fire (1983), Hoosiers (1986), No Way Out (1987) and Mississippi Burning (1988).
The 1990s brought him his second Oscar as he earned the Best Supporting Actor gong for his work as sadistic sheriff 'Little' Bill Daggett alongside Clint Eastwood in 1992's Unforgiven.
He rounded out that decade by also starring in Narrow Margin (1990), Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), The Firm (1993), The Chamber (1996), Wyatt Earp (1994), The Quick And The Dead (1995), Crimson Tide (1995), Get Shorty (1995,) Absolute Power (1997), The Birdcage (1996) and Enemy Of The State (1998).
Hackman continued to be active in the early 2000s with roles in Behind Enemy Lines (2001), Heist (2001), Runaway Jury (2003), and even earned the Golden Globe for Best Actor - Musical or Comedy for 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums.
A deeply complicated man, Hackman was strangely squeamish about on-screen violence but loved a real-life scrap, according to Hoffman.
Hoffman recalled his friend once announcing 'I gotta go' and disappearing off to a bar because he 'had to get in a fight'.
He was still getting into fights in his seventies. In 2001, a 71-year-old Hackman started a fist fight with two men over a minor traffic accident in West Hollywood.
'He brushed against me and I popped him,' he recalled. 'Then the other guy jumped on me. We had this ugly wrestling match on the ground.
'The police came … I got a couple of good shots in. The guy had me around the neck. That's the ugly part. When you're down on the ground and you're nearly 72 years old.'
Even so, Hackman was hardly one to believe that placid, well-adjusted people necessarily made great actors.
His instinctive rebelliousness, he claimed in a rare 1994 interview, was seeded in a traumatic and unhappy childhood in which his violently disciplinarian father abandoned the family when he was 13 and his alcoholic mother eventually died in a house fire in 1962, reportedly passing out while holding a lit cigarette.
Hackman admitted that like so many successful actors always away filming he had seriously neglected his family.
'You become very selfish as an actor. You spend so many years wanting desperately to be recognized as having the talent and then when you're starting to be offered these parts, it's very tough to turn anything down,' he said.
'Even though I had a family, I took jobs that would separate us for three or four months at a time.'
Hackman divorced his first wife, Faye Maltese, in 1986 after spending 30 years together and raising three children - Christopher Allen and daughters Leslie Anne and Elizabeth Jean.
He and Arakawa, who was 32 years her husband's junior, reportedly began dating in the mid-1980s after meeting at a gym in California.
Arakawa, who is believed to have been born in Hawaii, was pursuing a career in classical music at the time while working shifts in the gym.
Five years later, he walked down the aisle with Arakawa. The pair settled down in a two-bedroom house in Santa Fe.
Hackman later insisted that their relationship began after his divorce from Maltese, who he was married to from 1956 to 1986.
Discussing what he had in common with his character Harry Mackenzie, who leaves his wife for a barmaid in the 1985 film Twice in a Lifetime, he told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel: 'By the way, I did not leave my real-life wife for a younger woman.
'We just drifted apart. We lost sight of each other. When you work in this business, marriage takes a great deal of work and love.'
A naturally private man, Hackman was labelled a recluse as he remained out of the public eye for years on end but would be occasionally spotted pedaling around Santa Fe on a bicycle.
In an interview with Empire in 2020, the retired actor said he enjoyed watching DVDs that Arakawa rented.
'We like simple stories that some of the little low-budget films manage to produce,' he said.
'Friday night is set aside for a Comedy Channel marathon, with particular attention paid to Eddie Izzard. The speed of thought is amazing.'
Old friend Robert Duvall described him as 'a tormented guy, always into his own space, his own thing'.
Hackman insisted he never thought of himself as a 'star' - that was Warren Beatty, Robert Redford and Brad Pitt, he said.
The actor believed that celebrity was ruinous, observing: 'If you look at yourself as a star you've already lost something in the portrayal of any human being…You need to remember you're not a movie star and that you shouldn't be too happy.'
'Vesuvius' said he'd rather just be remembered as a 'decent actor'.
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