Though he’d had small roles in movies and on television throughout the early 1960s (he’d been a Marine before that, and had studied journalism and television production on the G.I. Bill), Hackman was 36 before anyone really took notice.

One of the greatest American actors of the 20th century was voted “least likely to succeed” by his first theater school, wasn’t a star until he was 40 and possessed a face he once described as “your everyday mineworker.

I n 1956, an aspiring young actor named Gene Hackman joined the Pasadena Playhouse in California, struggling to find a way into a field he’d been fascinated with since childhood