From The Conversation to The Royal Tenenbaums, the actor rode America’s new wave to become the gold standard for characterful acting with heft

• Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, die

As the movie ends, our point of view pans slowly, relentlessly, back and forth like a security camera across the trashed apartment. It has been ripped apart floorboard by floorboard in a doomed attempt to find the bugging device spying on the guy who lives there. With every sweep, the man is seen in the corner, playing the sax. Fatalistic, but not exactly despairing; realistic but not precisely disillusioned – the craftsman who is an artist at heart, nonchalant, magnificent. Gene Hackman’s performance as surveillance expert Harry Caul in Francis Coppola’s paranoid conspiracy drama The Conversation (1974) was a jewel in his career. Caul is a pro eavesdropper who becomes obsessed with a conversation he records for a mysterious client that, to his horror, reveals a murder plot – unlocking his own private agonies of guilt and loneliness. The film turns on some variants of intonation and pitch that Harry doesn’t understand until it’s too late.

The death of Gene Hackman marks the end of one of the greatest periods of US cinema: the American new wave. Hackman was the gold standard for this era, ever since Warren Beatty gave him his big break with the role of Buck Barrow in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967). He was the character actor who was really a star; in fact the star of every scene he was in – that tough, wised-up, intelligent but unhandsome face perpetually on the verge of coolly unconcerned derision, or creased in a heartbreakingly fatherly, pained smile. He wasn’t gorgeous like Redford or dangerously sexy like Nicholson, or even puckish like Hoffman; Hackman was normal, but his normality was steroidally supercharged. His hair was of its age: frizzy, with evident male-pattern baldness. You really don’t get star haircuts like that any more.