Two-time Oscar winner Gene Hackman and wife found dead in Santa Fe home -VIDEO
Legendary actor, two-time Oscar winner and author Gene Hackman and his wife, classical pianist Betsy Arakawa, were found dead Wednesday afternoon in their home in the Santa Fe Summit community northeast of the city.
Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza confirmed just after midnight Thursday the couple had died, along with their dog, News.Az reports, citing foreign media.
Mendoza said in an interview Wednesday evening there was no immediate indication of foul play. He did not provide a cause of death or say when the couple might have died.
Hackman, 95, had lived in Santa Fe since the 1980s and married Arakawa, 63, in 1991.
Sheriff's deputies arrived at the couple's home on Old Sunset Trail, in a gated community off Hyde Park Road just north of Ten Thousands Waves, on Wednesday afternoon to investigate the deaths of two elderly people and a dog. It was unclear whether the deputies were responding to a report of the deaths or if they were making a welfare check at the home.
The deputies discovered the bodies of a man in his 90s and a woman in her 60s, Mendoza initially reported.
"All I can say is that we're in the middle of a preliminary death investigation, waiting on approval of a search warrant," the sheriff said Wednesday evening, before his agency had positively identified the pair.
"I want to assure the community and neighborhood that there's no immediate danger to anyone," he said.
Born Jan. 30, 1930, in San Bernardino, Calif., Hackman won numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, over the course of his long career. Among his many famous roles were Detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in 1971’s The French Connection, for which he won the Oscar for best actor, and Sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett in the 1992 Clint Eastwood film Unforgiven, for which he won the best supporting actor award.
In other well-known roles, Hackman played Clyde’s brother Buck Barrow in 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, an FBI agent investigating the murder of civil rights activists in Mississippi Burning in 1988 and Lex Luthor in several Superman movies in the 1970s and 1980s.
He was married to his first wife, Faye Maltese, from 1956 to 1986, and the couple had three children — Christopher, Elizabeth and Leslie, according to People.
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