Did Gene Hackman star in the greatest movie car chase of all time?

Even in an age of computer-generated effects and multi-million pound stunt sequences in movie franchies like Fast and Furious and Mission: Impossible, it stands as one of the greatest cinematic car chases of all time.

The three-minute-something scene after Gene Hackman’s brash New York cop Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle commandeers a brown Pontiac LeMans to chase a hijacked elevated train carrying escaping hitman Pierre ‘Frog Two’ Nicoli forms a breathtaking centrepiece to The French Connection.

Filmed on the streets of Brooklyn, amid real traffic and pedestrians in an age before all-encompassing health and safety, director William Friedkin crouched in the back seat holding the camera – on the grounds his crew were married with children and he wasn’t.

While legendary Hollywood stunt driver Bill Hickman was hired to navigate five key moments – including several heart-stopping near misses – Hackman drove “considerably more than half of the shots that are used in the final cut”, according to the director, who added: “In most shots, the car was going at speeds between 70 to 90 miles an hour.”

Hackman, who had spent several weeks preparing by shadowing Eddie Egan, the real-life detective on whom Popeye was based, never blinked despite moments of genuine peril over five weeks of filming on the wintry streets.

Little wonder the 1971 movie, based on real-life US narcotics cops attempting to smash an international drug-trafficking ring, thrilled audiences around the world and won five Oscars, including a Best Actor statue for Hackman – the first of two Academy Awards in a career spanning six decades.

It made him a superstar and, for almost any other actor, The French Connection would have overshadowed everything else.

But for Hackman, one of cinema’s greatest all-rounders who has died at the age of 95, the breakthrough role was just another day at the office.

He thrilled audiences as Buck Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), a widowed college professor in the drama I Never Sang for My Father (1970), and an FBI agent investigating the disappearance of three civil rights workers in Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988).

The 1986 drama Hoosiers in which he played with steely gravitas Coach Norman Dale, who takes his small-town Indiana basketball team to the state tournament against overwhelming odds, was another mesmerising role. As was his Major General Stanislaw Sosabowski, a real-life Polish general, in Richard Attenborough’s 1977 war epic, A Bridge Too Far.

He won new fans playing Lex Luthor opposite Christopher Reeve in Superman, the 1978 film and two sequels proved highly lucrative.

Perplexingly, Hackman turned down leading roles in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Network, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jaws, which instead featured his French Connection co-star Roy Scheider.

But even if The French Connection, for which he was the sixth actor considered for the role, ultimately defines him, four years ago Hackman confessed he’d only seen the movie once.

“[I] haven’t seen the film since the first screening in a dark, tiny viewing room in a post-production company’s facility 50 years ago,” he said.

“Filmmaking has always been risky – both physically and emotionally – but I do choose to consider that film a moment in a checkered career of hits and misses.” As for the car chase, he claimed of Steve McQueen’s classic 1968 film Bullitt was the superior.

“There was a better one filmed a few years earlier with Steve McQueen.”

Yet despite his unassuming modesty, he was nicknamed “Vesuvius” on sets for the volcanic anger that would occasionally erupt.

It was Hackman’s versatility that was key to his longevity.

Despite playing hard-boiled characters like ‘Popeye’ and Unforgiven’s roguish ‘Little’ Bill Daggett (which earned him a second Oscar for best supporting actor), he was never a conventional Hollywood leading man.

His 6ft 2in frame and rugged looks made him striking without being traditionally good-looking. Few could do offbeat sensitivity, toughness and edginess better.

One critic described his look as “average mid-Western” and he was supremely comfortable playing blue collar roles.

A nervy on-screen persona, he speculated, came from personal tragedy as a young man. And he rarely played the Hollywood game, remaining uneasy with his fame, once admitting: ‘‘I’m a private person… I like to be as average on the street as I can, and not picked out.’’

Eugene Alden Hackman was born on January 30, 1930, in San Bernardino, California, and was brought up in Danville, Illinois, a small, forgettable town where his father, also Eugene, was a printer on the local Danville Commercial-News paper.

When he was 13, his parents divorced and his father left home.

His mother, Anna, an alcoholic, would later die in a house fire started by her cigarette. “Acting was something I wanted to do from the time I was 10 and saw my first movie,” he once recalled.

Having left home at 16, he lied about his age and joined the US Marines who posted him to China.

Yet having soon come to regret his decision he mustered out after his three-year term was up and worked in a variety of jobs while studying at the University of Illinois. He took odd jobs and learned acting at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, where he was voted the least likely to succeed along with his classmate, another aspiring actor called Dustin Hoffman.

Thankfully, rejection motivated him. He once recalled: “It was more psychological warfare, because I wasn’t going to let those f***ers get me down. I insisted with myself that I would continue to do whatever it took to get a job. It was like me against them.” He admitted he only started to take acting seriously after meeting an unprepossessing Marlon Brando, and thinking he might actually have what it took to be a star himself. Having bluffed his way into a summer job with the Gateway Playhouse at Bellport, Long Island, he appeared in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge.

He made his Broadway debut in 1963 in a short-lived production, but returned a year later in the major hit, Any Wednesday, opposite Sandy Dennis.

His first film was Mad Dog Coll in 1961 but it was a blink-and-you’ll miss it appearance in Lilith three years later as a miserably-married racist love rival to Warren Beatty that helped make his mark.

Acclaim in The French Connection brought roles in 1970s disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure, as well as the thrillers Cisco Pike and Prime Cut.

He played a professional eavesdropper in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Appearing as Harold, the blind man, in Mel Brooks’ brilliant horror spoof Young Frankenstein, 1974, opposite the other great Gene of Hollywood, Wilder, showed he could also do comedy.

Off-screen, Hackman, who retired from acting in 2004 following his 100th big screen credit, Welcome to Mooseport, painted and was a racing car enthusiast.

He spent his later years writing novels.

In 1956 he married Faye Maltese, a bank clerk, with whom he had two daughters and a son. They divorced and, in 1991, and he married pianist Betsy Arakawa, three decades his junior, with whom he was found dead.

In a career of unparalleled quality, a rare miss-step was the sequel to The French Connection in 1975. “I got depressed after a couple of my pictures failed to make money and I thought, ‘Hell, I’ll do pictures that will definitely make money and then I’ll have plenty of dough’,” he recalled.

Playing FBI agent Rupert Anderson in Mississippi Burning in 1988 – which explored America’s uneasy relationship with race – earned him another Best Actor Oscar nomination and helped cement his reputation, but he lost to his friend Dustin Hoffman for Rain Man.

Two years later Hackman underwent heart surgery but returned revitalised to enjoy his second Oscar win for Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. Subsequently, he played Tom Cruise’s legal mentor in The Firm, the adaptation of John Grisham’s legal thriller; a rogue sub commander in Crimson Tide; a shady movie producer opposite John Travolta in Get Shorty – based on the Elmore Leonard book; and a corrupt president in Eastwood’s Absolute Power in 1997.

As legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola wrote last night: “Gene Hackman was a great actor, inspiring and magnificent in his work and complexity. I mourn his loss, and celebrate his existence and contribution.”

Sentiments millions of fans will be feeling today.