Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman, wife found dead in Santa Fe home

Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman was found dead alongside his wife, classical pianist Betsy Arakawa, and their dog in their Santa Fe home on Wednesday afternoon.

Hackman was 95 at the time of his death and his wife 63. The office confirmed that foul play is not suspected as a factor in the deaths at this time, but the cause of death has not been determined. 

“On February 26, 2025 at approximately 1:45 p.m., Santa Fe County Sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to an address on Old Sunset Trail in Hyde Park where Gene Hackman, 95 and his wife Betsy Arakawa, 64, and a dog were found deceased,” the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s office told Fox News Digital early Thursday morning. 

Hackman was best known for his Oscar-winning performances in “The French Connection” and “Unforgiven.” He appeared as villains, heroes and antiheroes in dozens of dramas, comedies and action films from the 1960s until his retirement in the early 2000s.

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Hackman also had a breakout performance in “Bonnie and Clyde,” a comic interlude in “Young Frankenstein,” a turn as the comic book villain Lex Luthor in “Superman” and the title character in Wes Anderson’s 2001 “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

“The loss of a great artist, always cause for both mourning and celebration: Gene Hackman a great actor, inspiring and magnificent in his work and complexity,” Francis Ford Coppola, who wrote and directed the 1974 film “The Conversation” – in which Hackman starred in – wrote on Instagram. “I mourn his loss, and celebrate his existence and contribution.”

Eugene Alden Hackman was born Jan. 30, 1931, in San Bernardino, California, and grew up in Danville, Illinois, where his father worked as a pressman for the Commercial-News. His parents fought repeatedly, and his father often used his fists on Gene to take out his rage, according to the Associated Press. The boy found refuge in movie houses, identifying with Errol Flynn and James Cagney as his role models.

When Gene was 13, his father waved goodbye and drove off, never to return. The abandonment was a lasting injury to Gene. His mother had become an alcoholic and was constantly at odds with her mother, with whom the shattered family lived (Gene had a younger brother). At 16, he “suddenly got the itch to get out.” Lying about his age, he enlisted in the U.S. Marines.

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An article on the Department of Defense’s website said doing that “was a fairly common practice before the advent of computer records” and that Hackman served from 1947 to 1952 as a field radio operator and broadcast journalist.

“In the 1940s, he was stationed in Qingdao, China, and then Shanghai. Part of his duties, he said, was destroying Japanese military equipment so that the communists couldn’t obtain it,” the article also reads.

In 1956, Hackman married Fay Maltese, a bank teller he had met at a YMCA dance in New York. They had a son, Christopher, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Leslie, but divorced in the mid-1980s. In 1991 he married Betsy Arakawa, a classical pianist of Japanese descent who was raised in Hawaii.

When not on film locations, Hackman enjoyed painting, stunt flying, stock car racing and deep sea diving. In his latter years, he wrote novels and lived on his ranch in Sante Fe, on a hilltop looking out on the Colorado Rockies.

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Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza originally told the Santa Fe New Mexican that at the time of the initial report they were conducting a preliminary death investigation.

This investigation into his death is ongoing.

Fox News’ Greg Norman and the Associated Press contributed to this report.