Gene Hackman’s daughter, Leslie Anne Hackman, said that her father was in “good health” before authorities discovered him dead on Wednesday.
“Despite his age, he was in very good physical condition,” Leslie Anne told The Daily Mail on Thursday. Hackman was 95 years old at the time of his death. “He liked to do Pilates and yoga, and he was continuing to do that several times a week. So he was in good health.”
The actor’s daughter noted that he had not undergone any major surgeries within the past few months and that “there was no indication that there was any problem.”
She did admit that his death was “not terribly shocking because he was 95” and that she hadn’t seen or spoken to her father and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, 64, in a couple of months because she lives in California.
“We were close. I hadn’t talked to them for a couple months, but everything was normal and everything was good,” she explained.
Authorities found Hackman and Arakawa dead in their home in Santa Fe, N.M., on Wednesday. Upon arrival, police found their bodies in separate rooms, one of their dogs “running loose on the property,” another sitting near Arakawa’s body, and a third dead in a closet.
They were discovered after a neighbor requested a welfare check, and police have since written that their deaths are “suspicious enough in nature to require a thorough search and investigation.”
The couple got married in 1991 and were together for 34 years before their shocking deaths.
