Oscar winner Gene Hackman's top 5 must-watch movies

French Connection (1971) - One of the greatest thrillers ever made, Gene 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.

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The Conversation (1974) - The following year, Hackman hit gold again opposite Al Pacino as two drifters in "Scarecrow", winning the Palm d'Or at Cannes. And 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.

Mississippi Burning (1988) - Drawn from the real-life FBI investigation into the disappearance of three civil rights activists in the Deep South in 1964, Hackman plays a former Mississippi sheriff who uses his southern wiles to smoke out the Ku Klux Klan members responsible for their murders.

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The Unforgiven (1992) - Hackman played the odious Sheriff "Little Bill" Daggett in Clint Eastwood's western, which the Los Angeles Times called the "finest since perhaps John Ford's 'The Searchers' in 1956". Hackman won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Eastwood also starred as his nemesis, retired gunslinger Will Munny.

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The Royal Tenenbaums(2001) - 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 (Anjelica Huston) are separating. Chaos ensues in Wes Anderson's whimsical black comedy.

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