Gene Hackman

Gene Hackman is eighty. I thought he'd always been eighty - or thereabouts. maybe that's a bit of an exageration but you know what I mean - he's never been young. Indeed, his film career didn't start properly until he was in his forties; whether that long period of waiting for something to turn up made him the often bitter seeming actor in later years can't be proved but I think he played the gruff guy more than most and better than most.
Mark Stein writes today: "He's like an old-time movie star - Spencer Tracy or Jimmy Cagney - fellows with lived-in faces."
Like them he was never the romantic lead though Tracy could do romantic comedy ("Pat and Mike") as he got older. But there was a gruff side to both Tracy and Cagney though maybe not as gruff as Hackman's.
He was best in roles in which he played a villain where he could use that bitter smile which wasn't a smile but a show of a smile to pretend that underneath that gruff exterior beat a heart, but a heart with not much love in it.
Woody Allen cast him in a film which I have not seen; when asked why he had cast Hackman he said he wanted a man for the part that looked like an ordinary guy, not someone like, say, Paul Newman: "Imagine an ordinary wife coming home and seeing Paul Newman sitting there in froint of the fire".
He's given up ac ting; now he paints and writes novels. He'll be interviewed one day no doubt, and like Kirk Douglas, will say something like he wished he had taken up writing before now and that it's better than acting..... Pull the other one.