'' GENE HACKMAN'S '' GEAR : ACTING MASTER HONOURS

GENE HACKMAN - ROCKETED TO FAME IN 1971 with is Oscar-winning role of hard-nosed New York City narcotics cop Jimmy ' Popeye ' Doyle in The French Connection.

Best known for playing cantankerous, often volatile characters who exude a virile and dangerous energy. Hackman was one of a generation of young actors who shook up Hollywood in the 1970s with his gritty, raw approach to performing.

Hackman got his first acting role in 1958, in an off-Broadway production of Chaparral, TV work followed, and finally films.

His first big screen breakthrough came playing Clyde Barrow's older brother, Buck, in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde [ 1967], which secured him his first nomination, for best supporting actor.

He was nominated again for Gilbert Gates'. I Never Sang For My Father [1970], playing a son whose aging dad becomes dependent on him. But it was William Friedkin's The French Connection that made Hackman a star.

The cop thriller about a narc trying to track down an elusive drug smuggler, was revolutionary for its time.

In the 1970s Hackman made film after film, including big budget disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure [1972], Francis Ford Coppola's paranoid thriller The Conversation [ 1974 ] a French Connection sequel in 1975 and Richard Attenborough's World War II epic A Bridge Too Far [ 1977 ].

Hackman also showed signs of a comic genius, as blind hermit in Mel Brooks' 1974 classic Young Frankenstein or as the smarmy nemesis Lex Luthor in Superman [1978 ] - the first and still one of the best, superhero movies.

The world will never forget Gene Hackman. He and his wife Betsy Arakawa, were found dead at their home in New Mexico.

The World Students Society thanks The Express Tribune.