Gene Hackman: Two Oscars, A Badge and A Bad Attitude

Gene Hackman was never going to be a dreamboat like Robert Redford or Paul Newman.

As a young actor, he didn't have the piercing blue eyes, the chiselled jaw or the boyish golden locks. He didn't inspire much swooning, as a rakish Harrison Ford did, or fizz with the brooding intensity of Al Pacino or Denzel Washington.

He was never a leading man – his path to Hollywood legend started on the square clearly marked 'character actor'. Someone that knew his craft and carved out a distinct niche for himself. If you wanted an actor to play someone formidable, capable of being both ferocious and buttoned-up, by turns bristling and empathetic, Gene Hackman was your man.

Hackman's excellence in tough, grizzled roles saw him win two Oscars before he retired from acting in 2004.

The first was Best Actor in 1972 for the role of rage-fuelled, racist cop 'Popeye' Doyle in The French Connection (1971). This gritty 70s crime thriller was deliberately shot like a documentary, eschewing complicated camera movement and instead reacting to the actors. Hackman's naturalistic, physical performance was framed perfectly in that style. Sequences of Hackman tearing up bars, flinging suspects around and what is often regarded as the greatest car chase in cinema history made Doyle feel less like a cop, and more like a dangerous force of nature.

His later Oscar was in 1993 for his part in Clint Eastwood's revisionist Western, Unforgiven (1992). He played Sheriff 'Little Bill' Daggett, a tough-as-oak sadist, fond of his own voice. Like many latter Westerns, the film dispensed with the moral certainties of the genre, instead painting a horizon full of cowardice, hypocrisy and killing. Daggett was a lawman who would complain "haven't you seen enough bloodshed">