LA Times
Authorities are investigating the deaths of Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman, his wife and their dog at their home in New Mexico but do not suspect foul play.
Their bodies were discovered in Santa Fe Wednesday afternoon during a welfare check, officials said.
Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department said they discovered Hackman, 95, his wife, Betsy Arakawa, 64, and the dog.
The office said a full investigation is underway and that no cause of death has been established. More
Hollywood Reporter Obit Here
Carbon monoxide.
Only it and the ATF would kill the dog too.
Great actor in actually entertaining movies.
I have no idea what his politics were, as it should be.
RIP Mr. And Mrs. Hackman
May the Lord comfort their family in their hour of need.
Yep… That was my guess too. Carbon monoxide from a damaged pinholed furnace heat exchanger, or a snow/ice dam on the roof dislodged the flue in the attic.
KR
He was incredible in “Unforgiven” opposite Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman, BTW. Check that one out if you watch nothing else from him.
And Richard Harris’s “English Bob”. Great movie!
…althogh him playing an athletic reverend in “The Poseidon Adventure” had its moments as well…
https://genesiustimes.com/gene-hackman-and-wife-betsy-arakawa-have-information-that-will-lead-to-the-arrest-of-hillary-clinton/
And don’t forget his short uncredited cameo in Young Frankenstein as the old blind guy who the monster (Peter Boyle) stumbles upon his cabin in the woods. And the second best next to Bullitt car chase thru the streets of NYC in The French Connection.
Pookie18, are you suggesting that hellary and bill arkancided Gene Hackman and his wife?
…they have to play this at his funeral. Appropriate since his character died in this movie too…
https://youtu.be/bcLazPauA1c?si=Cb9GEs1BZ4hB9_Xi
That’s sad to hear. Hackman was an astute, stellar actor. He made the characters he portrayed very believable. One of the great entertainers who lived in or from my hometown.
Two of my favorite Hackman movies are “The French Connection” and “The Quick and the Dead”. Hope they find out what happened as soon as possible.
In 38 years as an HVAC TECH for COMMERCIAL equip.
Esp with Natural GAS:
You need a really badly burning Furnace RED/YELLOW-ish back burning flames (severely gashed heat exchanger), A broken Chimney (inside), and some serious negligence to get that much Carbon Monoxide INSIDE a HOME. (CO)
While Laboratory pure CO itself is clear & odourless, In the FIELD it is ALWAYS accompanied by very shitty acid type & sooty type smell in any place & have ever come across its presence. (Not as bad as car exhaust but some similarities)
I have been in houses where the customer opens the door, their EYES are RED, they are mildly coughing & a sooty, incomplete combustion smell almost sulfur-ish is present. Guaranteed bad HEAT EXCHANGER or BLOCKED/BROKEN CHIMNEY
If the appliance is burning with a disconnected chimney, CLEAN CARBON DIOXIDE can displace the atmospheric AIR (Oxygen & Nitrogen) with VERY LITTLE SMELL. That will Drown you in CO2 not CO.
Eventually, when there is too much CO & not enough air, the Carbon monoxide starts to build due to improper combustion from not enough oxygen. That is usually when it becomes a CARBON MONOXIDE DEATH.
So,
From a stay safe perspective, there are quite a few things that warn you BEFORE you get to that point. Admittedly, as WE age we may not smell these warning signs that are usually present.
Once again, in REAL WORLD, I PERSONALLY have never experienced ODORLESS Carbon MONOXIDE from an appliance. Aldehyde has always been present.
Buy at least 2 detectors for your home, 1-battery powered & 1-115 wall powered in case of power outages in storm.
Get your gas furnaces checked at least 1 time per year & do a visual on chimneys after serious storms.
…and in Gene’s case, let’s HOPE it was not self inflicted, Clinticide, or some other UGLY thing.
I want to watch Crimson Tide tonight but that Face Shooting Sack-O-Shit is in it.
Carbon monoxide as SNS said. Faulty heater.
The guy seemed ageless, he was so good in everything he did. Popeye Doyle to the blind hermit dishing out soup to the high school coach winning the big game in Indiana to the sadistic marshal who finally gets what’s been coming for him.
He’s even good in the not-so-great movies. Hackman was the perfect evil boss in “Quick and the Dead” plus there’s the added benefit of watching a cocky Decaprio get gunned down.
Pookie18,
Looks like a humor site. Links on the left of that article:
“Judge Hugh Jassole rules that it’s unconstitutional to ask what government employees have done this week”
“First biological cheetah who identifies as a man set to take gold for Lichtenstein at the Paris Olympics”
“BREAKING: Lauren Boebert wears string bikini on House floor to test new congressional dress code”
“In order to save democracy we must replace the democratically-nominated candidate with someone no one voted for”
“Democrats warn they may never win another election again if Trump shuts down their USAID money laundering operation”
I enjoyed his role in “Runaway Jury” as the conniving bad guy.
The scene with him and Dustin Hoffman in the bathroom was brilliant. I wanted to wipe that smug look off his face!
The ending was exceptionally satisfying.
“When not on film locations, Hackman enjoyed painting, stunt flying, stock car racing and deep-sea diving. In his later years, he wrote novels and lived on his ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on a hilltop looking out on the Colorado Rockies, a view he preferred to his films that popped up on television.
“I’ll watch maybe five minutes of it,” he once told Time magazine, “and I’ll get this icky feeling, and I turn the channel.””
Modest – the way actors and those who aspire to “celebrity” should behave.
‘Enemy Of The State’ – 5 stars
He attended acting school with Al Pacino and the two quickly became friends. Everyone else hated them both. Hackman was voted least likely to succeed. I’ve enjoyed every bit of his work.
What I really liked about him is I have no idea what his politics were.
Kcir
Thursday, 27 February 2025, 11:24 at 11:24 am
“Once again, in REAL WORLD, I PERSONALLY have never experienced ODORLESS Carbon MONOXIDE from an appliance. Aldehyde has always been present.”
…agreed, but theres some issues that may obviate that.
One, sleeping people generally dont react to smells. This can be a blessing if the spouse went heavy on the beans, but a curse if your flue becomes blocked after the fam bedded down for the night. Seen that before.
Two, you are priviledged to have an educated nose. Most ordinary folk may smell something, but think along the lines of “The heater always smells funny when it hasnt run for awhile” or “that car that went by has a smelly exhaust”.
And theres sensory extinction. People who live with smells tend to “blank” them mentally, which is why that aunt with all the cats doesnt realize she smells like them. If youre in a house with a small leak for a long time, your mind can put it in the “Ignore” file so it just doesnt register when it gets bigger. You may also have vocational workers like welders who just dont notice smells like that any more because they are just too ordinary to them.
Too, all senses get duller as we age, including smell. For many of her last years my mother couldnt smell at all, and this isnt uncommon amoung the elderly. This always made things more exciting at the assisted living facility in my district because folks would have a “food on the stove” fire and even with visible smoke in the halls her neighbors wouldnt notice it in their rooms, so theyd still be in there and conpletely unaware of it when we got there.
Also, getting back to “food on the stove”, its REALLY ordinary for older folks to put something on the stove and just forget it until all the water is gone and it starts smoking. Some smells can linger and overshadow weaker, but much more deadly, smells. When someone thinks they know the explanation of a smell, they do not keep looking.
And it depends on how focused you are on something else too. We called our cops “Canaries” because they would enter a house ahead of us if the atmopsphere “seemed” clear, with too much courage and not enough SCBA. This would result in woozy cops needing pulled out, proving conclusively it was a hazardous atmosphere without ever having to pull out the MSA four gas analyzer. It wasnt that the cops were stupid, they just underestimated that which they could not see because their focus was elsewhere.
And some folks just plain dont want to deal with problems so they willfully ignore them and hope they go away. Something like this…
https://youtu.be/hUsldsGubhg?si=N6cDmpAYsFu34shK
…so lots of ways this can happen, even in the modern age. None of the above would surprise me. With the participants deceased, we will likely never know.
…of course, the source can ALSO be a car left running in a tuck-under garage on purpose for a murder/suicide kinda thing if one spouse is very sick and the other spouse doesnt want to go on without them in which case they will NOT care about the smell, but in this case that would require the cops to lie about the whole “no foul play” thing and SURELY cops..would…never…
Just saw this on X posted by Charlie Kirk:
“authorities are now calling their deaths “suspicious.””
https://x.com/charliekirk11/status/1895156878243701087
????
I’ve heard to theories on the carbon monoxide so far. I’m not buying either one. The heater, and some guy on FOX is alleging they forgot to turn their car off in the attached garage. The home was built new in 2000. So it was an older home but the family is saying they constantly updated it. The guy wasn’t poor. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
Kcir
Thursday, 27 February 2025, 11:24 at 11:24 am
“Buy at least 2 detectors for your home, 1-battery powered & 1-115 wall powered in case of power outages in storm.
Get your gas furnaces checked at least 1 time per year & do a visual on chimneys after serious storms.”
…this is GREAT advice. to which I would only add “Gas Water Heater” too.
My old house was built in the 1930s and was set up for a coal furnace at one end and a coal stove at the other. The stove end had been repuposed for a gas water heater, which was fine for a number of years until one day the detector went off. We had an appliance guy look and say the heater was fine, but the flue was clogged. We then had a chimney guy show us how, even though the brickwork on the OUTSIDE seemed great, the pipe INSIDE had collapsed and filled the tube with rubble.
After an eye-popping quote, I had him cap it off and replaced the gas water heater with electric.
…so yes, have them checked and have them monitored.
Your life may depend on it.
Claudia
Unfortunately, that makes much more sense. Door wide open? That wreck the CO2 angle.
Bad_Brad
Thursday, 27 February 2025, 12:55 at 12:55 pm
“…and some guy on FOX is alleging they forgot to turn their car off in the attached garage.”
…I refuse to keep a car in an attached or tuck-under garage myself.
Not really for that reason, but because I attended too many house fires that started as car fires in the garage.
…and that was BEFORE electric cars…
The rumor mill runs overtime until the facts come out.
BTW Bad_Brad – It’s tough to commit suicide-by-car-exhaust with today’s auto emissions being what they are especially when you’re not in the car or the garage.
Oh, that’s what I saw him on. The Poseidon Adventure.
I remember the movie because they showed it late at night on a ship I took across the Mediterranean in my early teens. I also watched Airport 77 on, you guessed it, an airplane.
Well, anyway, rest in peace to all three and I hope it wasn’t under suspicious actions.
Bad_Brad
Thursday, 27 February 2025, 12:58 at 12:58 pm
“Door wide open? That wreck the CO2 angle.”
…not necessarily. Both that and the live dog may not be disproof of CO poisioning because, depending on the HVAC system, whether it was even on, the status of vents in that room and doors between rooms being open or closed, CO and other gases can “pool” and coalace in some areas even if evacuated from others. We had to be pretty thorough in ventilating affected houses for just that reason, and never assumed one room was cleared just because the gas analyzer said the adjacent one was fine.
I’m hoping he didn’t self checkout or his wife didn’t Phil Hartman him.
Up here we get SO MANY murder suicides esp among “NEW Canadians” THAT IT IS USUALLY the first thing we think about when a household passes en mass.
My two favorite Gene Hackman roles are his FBI head in “Mississippi Burning” and “Senator Keeley” in “The Bird Cage.”
We speak a lot of memorable movie lines around here to emphasize our meaning. One of our frequent ones is from The Bird Cage (spoken by Hackman): “I think I’m going insane.” He says the line brilliantly and perfectly in response to his wife trying to explain that Nathan Lane “(THIS)IS A MAN!”
Unlike so many Hollywood “stars” (Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Brad Pitt, etc.) who merely hit their marks and play themselves, Gene Hackman was that rare actor who transformed himself to play a wholly-believable new character who emphasized all the traits one would imagine that character’s personality would have. This is what made him so delightful to watch.
95 years-old. That’s a lot of innings. Thank you Mr. Hackman. May you rest in the peace of God.
Harry
My understanding as well. When the guy on FOX blurted that out I was thinking that’s not even possible.
Kcir
Hackman was 93? I’m thinking he checked out. But the open door and a removed heater seem more than a bit strange.
” Gene Hackman was that rare actor who transformed himself to play a wholly-believable new character ”
I caught an interview with a director that worked with him and the guy said that in one particular role Hackman was so intense that he scared the crap out of him.
His role in the Unforgiven was off the charts good. Little Bill I believe.