Gene Hackman Thought He Was ‘A Fair Actor’ And A ‘Fair-To-Poor Race Car Driver’

The great actor Gene Hackman, his wife Betsy, and their dog were found dead in their home yesterday afternoon according to reports. No foul play is suspected. I want to write about Hackman not so much because he appeared in the influential car chase movie The French Connection, but because he was a decent driver who competed in multiple endurance races, including the 1983 24 Hours of Daytona driving a Toyota Celica.

There are numerous actors who, for whatever reason, decided to try their hands at racing. The two most famous are probably Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. Having talked to people who knew them both, McQueen was like the more naturally talented whereas Newman was the one who worked hardest to be good at it.

Rarely mentioned is Oscar-winner Hackman, who worked his way up from celebrity racing, through Bob Bondurant’s racing school, and all the way up to professional endurance racing. He ended up winning a number of pro-celebrity races and he, too, clearly had some talent.

Could he have gone on to be a professional? Here’s Hackman in a Los Angeles Times article detailing his view on it:

“Would I have chosen racing over acting? I’ve thought about it quite a bit. I have a feeling I wouldn’t have stayed in racing. I don’t think I have the personality to be a real racing professional.

“I think that, to be really good, you have to be extremely selfish, which is probably true in a lot of professions, including acting. So I could maybe fulfill that part of it. But I think you need a tougher personality than I have. You have to be harder than I’m capable of.

“You can learn some of the skills of racing, you can learn all the mechanical things, but there’s a certain part of it that really no one can teach you – that killer instinct. You have to be very competitive. You need to have that edge about you. The good ones all have that.

The humility that Hackman shows when he talks about his racing is similar to Newman, who always went out of his way to acknowledge that everyone else was a real professional. Both would often speak about their acting with similar deprecation, which everyone knows is crap. They were both remarkable actors.

You can see Hackman’s reserve on display, again, here in an interview at the 1983 Daytona 24.

The reporter asks the obvious question about race car driving versus acting and Hackman says, “Well, I consider myself a fair actor and a kind of a fair-to-poor racing driver, so I’ll have to stick to acting.”

He probably made the right choice. Though he did compete at the 1983 Daytona race alongside the legendary Masanori Sekiya (the first Japanese driver to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans), the team DNF’d. Hackman fared a little better at the Six Hours of Riverside, ending up 16th overall and fifth in class. He’d be on the entry list for two more Daytonas, but never again actually competed.

I love this photo above, from Toyota’s archive, which shows pro driver Willy T. Ribbs (then Trans-Am Rookie of the Year) and Hackman just hanging out at Daytona. If you’ve ever done an endurance race, this is mostly what it’s like. For all the adrenaline, there’s a lot of waiting around.

In that way, I suppose, it’s a lot like acting.

It would not be fitting to end this story without seeing some of Hackman’s driving, so here’s the famous subway chase from The French Connection:

Hackman claims to only be driving in about 60% of these shots, which is still impressive. The actor also takes credit for destroying two cars.

RIP to a real one.

All photos Courtesy of Toyota Motor North America