A brief note tonight on the death of Gene Hackman. I don’t have much to add to Giancarlo Sopo’s excellent tribute to the actor (dead at age 95) right now — I expect to devote a significant amount of next week’s Carnival of Fools to him as a tribute, unless Donald Trump does something crazy in the meantime like attempting to annex North Korea — but I wanted to at least chime in here on the Corner tonight to briefly explain what Hackman meant to me as child of the Eighties. (I hope to expand upon his cinematic accomplishments later.)

Because for kids back then, Gene Hackman was pretty much your dad on screen. Don’t get me wrong — he might not have looked like my dad or carried himself like yours — but he stood out so much to me even back then because he exuded such a paternal air of authority. That made him fundamentally different from every other “big name” actor of his era for me. Tom Cruise was a pretty boy. Al Pacino was a brooding dark soul (who eventually turned into a caricature of himself). Schwarzenegger was a live-action cartoon. De Niro didn’t even exist to me back then — all his films were R-rated, after all, even the classic comedy Midnight Run. But Gene Hackman was Coach Dale in Hoosiers. He was Agent Anderson cracking racist skulls as Willem Dafoe looked on with a concerned frown in Mississippi Burning. He used that same energy — a demeanor that almost instinctively creates fatherly trust — to play equally brilliant villains, like Avery Tolar in The Firm and “Little Bill” Daggett in Unforgiven. He was never anything less than utterly commanding.

This morning we were discussing and lamenting Gene Hackman’s passing around the watercooler here at National Review. As we were each naming our favorite films of his, something struck me: None of us had even repeated each other’s picks. That in its own way is the greatest tribute that can be paid to Hackman’s achievements — name your five favorite film appearances of his, I’ll name mine, and we could easily end up with a list of ten.