AFP
One of the greatest thrillers ever made, Hackman won the best actor Oscar for his obsessive New York Detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle on the trail of international heroin smugglers.
William Friedkin's action-packed yarn never lets up for a second, and its car chase under the elevated Brooklyn subway has gone down in film legend.
He hit still greater heights in "The Conversation", playing a paranoid, secretive surveillance expert having a crisis of conscience in Francis Ford Coppola's thriller.
Hackman plays a former Mississippi sheriff who uses his southern wiles to smoke out the Ku Klux Klan members responsible for their murders.
Hackman played the odious Sheriff "Little Bill" Daggett in Clint Eastwood's western. Hackman won the best supporting actor Oscar.
Hackman played the pater familias of an eccentric over-achieving New York family, who has to explain to his grown-up children why he and his wife are separating.