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Two-time Oscar winner Gene Hackman, 95, and his wife Betsy Arakawa have been found dead in their home in the US state of New Mexico, the Santa Fe New Mexican website said on Thursday.

The website quoted Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza as saying the couple had died along with their dog, and that there was no immediate indication of foul play.

The local police were not immediately available for comment.

Hackman was an intense character actor who won Academy Awards for the violent 1971 drug saga The French Connection and the 1992 western Unforgiven.

The former Marine appeared in more than 80 films, as well as on television and the stage during a lengthy career that started in the early 1960s.

He earned his first Oscar nomination for his breakout role as the brother of bank robber Clyde Barrow in 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde. He was also nominated for best supporting actor in 1971 for I Never Sang for My Father. It was his turn as Popeye Doyle, the rumpled New York detective chasing international drug dealers in director William Friedkin’s thriller The French Connection, that assured his stardom and a best actor Academy Award.

He also won a best supporting actor Oscar in 1993 as a mean sheriff in the Clint Eastwood western Unforgiven, and was nominated for an Academy Award for his turn as an FBI agent in the 1988 historical drama Mississippi Burning.

Hackman could come across on the screen as menacing or friendly, working with a face that he described to the New York Times in 1989 as that of “your everyday mine worker.” A method actor, he drew from his personal experience to flesh out a role. His characters were sometimes raw and violent and ranged from a small-town basketball coach in the 1986 sports film Hoosiers to Superman’s archrival Lex Luthor.

Acting honours apparently did not mean much to Hackman. In 2011, he told Time magazine he was unsure where his Oscar statuettes were.

Uniform praise

Among critics, who uniformly praised his acting, Hackman was alternately lauded as one of the great underrated stars and criticized for abandoning good character parts in favor of leading roles.

He conceded that there was a period when he took roles primarily for the money, but still came up with notable performances such as Lex Luthor, the campy villain of Superman (1978) and two sequels.

Hackman also starred as a vagabond with Al Pacino in Scarecrow (1973), a surveillance expert in The Conversation (1974), an admiral in Enemy of the State (1987) and an eccentric patriarch in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).

“Even at their jauntiest, Hackman’s performances have volcanic undercurrents”, The Guardian newspaper said in 2002. “It might be that the secret of his singularity is that his comfort zone is a scary and volatile place.”

Hackman retired in his 70s, saying the parts he was offered were too grandfatherly. His last substantial role was in the 2004 comedy Welcome to Mooseport.

“I miss the actual acting part of it as it’s what I did for almost 60 years and I really loved that,” he told Reuters in 2008. “But the business for me is very stressful … and it had gotten to a point where I just didn’t feel like I wanted to do it anymore.”

Living outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, Hackman was married twice and had three children — Christopher, Elizabeth Jean and Leslie Anne — with his late ex-wife, Faye Maltese, who died in 2017. He married Arakawa in 1991.