Show Business: Hackman: A Capper for a Craftsman

Rumpled and lumbering, with a line of patter as weary as his smile, agent Rupert Anderson looks miscast as a male Mata Hari. Yet here he stands in Mrs. Pell's hallway, romancing the sad beautician in hopes of securing testimony against her husband. It seems a cruel bit of FBI sleuthing -- until Anderson steals a glance at her hair. The glance passes as quick as guilt and as long as longing. From it we learn that Anderson knows more about women than we thought, and feels more for this woman than he should.

This privileged moment from Mississippi Burning comes courtesy of Gene Hackman, the movies' modern Spencer Tracy. "Gene is a colossally subtle actor," says director Alan Parker. "He knows what not to do. Like Tracy, he doesn't talk about what he does; he just does it." Hackman, 57, has America's face, a body that has absorbed its share of life's shocks, a heart that has taken a licking and keeps on ticking. He can play the stern father or the doting uncle, a bad cop or a top sergeant, your best friend or the man you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. As agent Anderson, Hackman plays what he is: the average Joe's best image of himself.

Hackman thinks of himself as a craftsman in an honored, perhaps vanishing tradition. "All of us," he says, "from ditchdiggers to bus drivers to shoe salesmen, have a need to create something. I'm blessed that I found a profession that lets me do so. Once in a while, a piece of artistry flows by me or through me, but it's a mistake to think of myself as 'artistic.' It looks relaxed, easy, but I work very hard."

No lie there: he must spend more time acting than Michael Caine put together. This fall, five Hackman films were released. "I'll take what's offered me," he says, "as long as it falls into certain parameters. I'm not going for the home run every time." Sometimes Hackman has hit bunt singles in a movie resume as long as a Chicago Cubs season. Yet he projects such solid authority that not even junk can embarrass him. "I actually think I've been lucky," says the star who can't say no. "Working constantly not only keeps me sharp, but relieves me of the responsibility of having to perform up to a certain level if I had been waiting for the 'right' role."

Hackman learned a lot, the hard way, before he ever stepped in front of the camera. His father, a newspaper pressman in Danville, Ill., beat young Gene. "Though he left town when I was 13," Hackman recalls, "he'd drift back periodically to disrupt things. I was so shy that I never dated in high school. Sexual frustration, plus my unwillingness to live up to my mother's expectations or to be a father to my younger brother, gave me more than enough reasons to get out of town and join the Marines." His lone consolations were a doting grandmother -- "a great gal, a storyteller, a sanctuary" -- and the movies. "When I'd walk out of the theater, I knew I was really Errol Flynn or James Cagney. And kids from disturbed environments visualize what they feel is the perfect life. Through acting they can realize their fantasies, recover their lost dreams."