Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman were voted least likely to succeed
At the Pasadena Playhouse, classmates singled out two outsiders as the students least likely to make it: Gene Hackman and his friend Dustin Hoffman. Hackman also got the lowest mark the school had ever handed out. He answered with two Academy Awards and a screen career lasting more than four decades.
Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California, on January 30, 1930. His mother, from Sarnia in Ontario, had worked as an actress, painter, pianist and waitress; his father ran the press at a local paper. After many moves the family ended up in Danville, Illinois. Hackman said he chose acting at 10, and his father walked out when he was 13.
At 16 he lied about his age to join the Marines and served four and a half years handling field radios, posted to Qingdao and Shanghai. He recalled destroying Japanese equipment so it would not fall to Communist forces, and after 1949 he was moved on to Hawaii and Japan. Discharged in 1951, he drifted through jobs in New York and a spell studying journalism on the G.I. Bill before trying acting in 1956.
The humiliations kept coming. A former teacher spotted him working at Howard Johnson's and declared it proof he would never amount to anything. In the 1960s he, Hoffman and Robert Duvall shared New York flats in rotating pairs. The Broadway hit Any Wednesday in 1964 finally opened doors to film, starting with Lilith. Mike Nichols cast him as Mr. Robinson in The Graduate, then fired him three weeks into rehearsals for looking too young. The same year, playing Buck Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde earned his first Oscar nomination.
He won Best Actor as the detective Popeye Doyle in The French Connection and Best Supporting Actor as a brutal sheriff in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, and he played Lex Luthor in three Superman films. He stepped away from acting in 2004 and wrote novels while narrating the odd documentary until 2017. He died at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2025.
Source: Gene Hackman
