A good deal has already been written and will continue to be over the next several days regarding the career of renowned actor Gene Hackman, who earlier this week was found dead, along with his classical musician wife Betsy Arakawa, in their Santa Fe, N.M. home. The 95-year-old two-time Academy Award winner appeared in over 70 films, from an uncredited part in the 1961 gangster flick Mad Dog Coll to his 2004 swan song as a former U.S. president in the slapstick satire Welcome to Mooseport. This lengthy résumé includes such cinema classics as Bonnie and Clyde, The French Connection, The Poseidon Adventure, Superman, Hoosiers, Unforgiven, The Birdcage, and numerous others. What I’d like to do here, however, is take a look back at Hackman’s pre-fame work in 1960s television…and shed some light on a pop culture urban legend that linked him to a beloved family sitcom.
By the end of the 1950s Hackman was just another struggling New York thespian. The ex-Marine had come to the Big Apple at the start of the decade but was inspired after watching Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire to try his hand at acting. Moving West, he studied briefly with the Pasadena Playhouse, where he and fellow neophyte Dustin Hoffman were deemed “Least Likely to Succeed.” Returning to New York City (Hackman, Hoffman, and friend Robert Duvall occasionally shared digs) Gene picked up credits in several Off-Broadway plays. He made his Broadway debut in 1963’s Children from Their Games. Larger roles in Any Wednesday and Poor Richard won him critical acclaim.
Before his stage career, however, the young actor found work in New York’s television studios. Gene’s first TV role came in “Little Tin God,” a 1959 episode of the dramatic anthology series The United States Steel Hour. Hackman would go on to make seven more appearances on the show from 1959 to 1962. He had a brief recurring role as a detective in the 1959 CBS police drama Brenner, a show which lasted only one season but was brought back with unaired episodes several times. As a result, Hackman’s three turns aired five years apart! He played opposite another future Oscar winner, Walter Matthau, in Matthau’s short-lived syndicated crime drama Tallahassee 7000 in 1961. The following year he made the first of two guest shots in the groundbreaking 1961-64 legal series The Defenders, which starred E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed (more about him later) as father-son attorneys. Hackman played the father of a newborn with Down syndrome in the show’s first episode, “The Quality of Mercy,” and later was a policeman in Season Two’s “Judgment Eve.”
You have to look quickly to catch Gene as a motorist in “Who Will Cheer My Bonnie Bride?,” a 1963 episode of the freewheelin’ hit Route 66, and that same year as another policeman in the acclaimed drama East Side, West Side with George C. Scott. He also played a reporter about witness a murderer’s date with the electric chair in Naked City, and even turned up in an installment of the Sunday morning religious series Look Up and Live.
Before they co-starred in the infamous 1975 bomb Lucky Lady, Hackman and Burt Reynolds teamed up for a 1966 episode of Reynolds’ early detective series Hawk. Also in ’66, Gene was a prosecuting attorney who goes before defense lawyer-turned-temporary judge Peter Falk in Falk’s short-lived pre-Columbo series, The Trials of O’Brien. 1967-68 saw Hackman guest star in some very different programs. He was a suburban husband who was part of a Chinese-backed spy ring on The F.B.I. In “Happy Birthday Everybody” on I Spy, Gene was a disturbed explosives expert out for revenge. And he was one of the human-looking aliens trying to take over the planet in Season Two’s “The Spores” from the cult fave sci-fi series The Invaders.
Hackman’s dramatic TV oeuvre wrapped up in 1968 with a pair of powerful feature-length tales. “My Father and My Mother,” an episode of the anthology series CBS Playhouse, featured him as a family man who–troubled after committing his developmentally disabled son to an institution–looks back on his own youth for answers. Ralph Bellamy and Jane Wyatt co-starred as the titular parents. And Shadow on the Land, an ABC telefilm based on Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here,” chronicled a fascist takeover of the U.S. government. Gene played a reverend alongside Jackie Cooper, John Forsythe, and Carol Lynley (who would later co-star with Hackman in The Poseidon Adventure).
Now then…it’s been a longstanding rumor that Hackman almost signed on to play architect-turned-father of six Mike Brady on ABC’s The Brady Bunch in 1969, but that he was rejected in favor of Robert Reed. According to series creator Sherwood Schwartz, Hackman–who had just made a name for himself in Bonnie and Clyde, was considered alongside other actors for the role, but Paramount opted for Reed, who was already under contract to the studio and was familiar to TV audiences thanks to The Defenders. Still, it does make one wonder.
Hackman later joined the zany cast of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In for a pair of 1972 episodes, but his final small-screen appearance would come 26 years later on–of all things–Guy Fieri’s culinary travel series Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. In the 2008 installment “What’s for Breakfast?,” Guy stops by a Santa Fe diner and chats with some of the restaurant’s regular patrons…including the Academy Award winner himself, who extolls the virtues of scrapple as a breakfast meat. It’s a fun and fitting coda to a Hollywood icon who saw himself as an “everyman actor” and shied away from the celebrity spotlight.