Gene Hackman was born January 30th, 1930 during the depression in San Bernadino, California and raised in rural Illinois. Hackman told Reader's Digest that his life choice was made when his father, a press operator, abandoned the family. It was in 1943, when Gene was only thirteen years old, that his father drove away without explanation. Gene recalls that his father simply waved and said "So long" as he left. "Maybe I am an actor because of that gesture of my father's." "Maybe because it was so…precise. It was all I ever needed to know about acting."

Hackman became a big fan of matinee idol Errol Flynn during his high school years, though he admits he was too shy to do any acting of his own. His only teenage diversion was basketball, and he excelled at it. Since he was the "man" of the house, the pressure proved too much for the young man and he dropped out of school to enroll in the Marines. He lied about his age because at sixteen he was too young to enlist without his parents' consent. Three months later he found himself in China.

His military career took him from Shanghai to Japan and Hawaii. He expended his extra energy in athletic pursuits. It wasn't until towards the end of his six-year stint that he made his first foray into show business. He became a broadcaster of the Armed Forces Network. Hackman never managed to rise above the rank of corporal, but he did manage to finish a high-school equivalency course. This allowed him to enroll in the University of Illinois after he was honorably discharged from the Marines in 1952 where he studied journalism.

School didn't appeal to the young Hackman much so he headed to New York. He enrolled briefly at the School of Radio Technique but it was long enough to land a radio job in Florida, however he still had a restless heart. He moved to California to give acting a shot. He enrolled in the acting school of the Pasadena Playhouse. Ironically he and classmate Dustin Hoffman were voted "least likely to succeed." The undeterred duo moved back to New York, where Hoffman camped out on Hackman's kitchen floor. After doing a number of odd jobs including a shoe salesman, furniture mover, truck driver and waiter, Hackman landed a fateful small role in 1964, in Warren Beatty's "Lilith". Beatty was so impressed with Hackmans talent that he cast him in "Bonnie & Clyde", in a role that garnered Hackman his fist of many Oscar nominations. And the rest, as they say, is history.