Good looks aren’t everything in screen acting. Gene Hackman, who has died at 95, was hardly the most conventionally handsome face in Hollywood, while the voice was a congestive rasp strewn with quirky chuckles and changes of pitch.
All this unusual leading man needed was the world’s worst hat — that unforgettable porkpie in The French Connection — to win the 1972 Best Actor Oscar. His browbeating New York police detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle was the anti-hero of the hour and year.
The actor went even more defiantly dowdy (crumpled raincoat, dowdy suit) for his role as a surveillance expert and conspiracy sleuth in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974).