Though he’d had small roles in movies and on television throughout the early 1960s (he’d been a Marine before that, and had studied journalism and television production on the G.I. Bill), Hackman was 36 before anyone really took notice.

Gene Hackman, who has died at 95, was a stunner in great movies and the best thing in many bad ones — a rumpled, roiling, always complex and often combustible presence who helped define the New Hollywood of the late ’60s and ’70s before going on to a varied and generous career.

One of the greatest American actors of the 20th century was voted “least likely to succeed” by his first theater school, wasn’t a star until he was 40 and possessed a face he once described as “your everyday mineworker.