The role for which the late Gene Hackman would win his first Oscar had already gone to somebody else when filming for The French Connection began in 1971.
The director, Billy Friedkin, had decided that the heavy set, tousle-haired New York newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin had just “the look” to play NYPD Detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle. Friedkin offered Breslin the one thing that could have persuaded the father of six to take time away from his writing.
It was the same thing that initially stood in the way when Breslin decided he did not want to do it after all: “The money,” recalls Kevin Breslin, one of Jimmy’s twin sons, who were 9 at the time.
“My mother said, ‘You can’t quit, we already spent the money.’”
In the meantime, Friedkin had put Breslin through wardrobe, which outfitted him with a black suit and white shirt that he wore to his home on Deepdene Road in Forest Hills, Queens. He retired to the upstairs master bedroom with the script, to which he had paid little attention before accepting payment. His wife, Rosemary Dattolico Brreslin, assigned the twist to help their father memorize his lines.
“I thought an actor was bigger than being a newspaper writer, because actors were famous,” Kevin recalled. “So now I figured, ‘Oh, he’s gonna be a famous actor.’”
Kevin remembers Jimmy handing him and his brother James the script, opened to a few particular lines.
“He would say, ‘Just read this,’” Kevin recalls.
The twins did as bid so their father could recite the lines back to them.
“And he would try to do it, and he couldn’t remember a f---ing thing,” Kevin recalled. “I just remember f---ing freaking… He got combustible.”
Jimmy reached for a Bic ballpoint pen, the same kind he would use to take notes while out on the street doing the job for which he was born.
“He’s circling his lines, like fucking trying to f---ing remember where the f--- he was, but he didn’t,” Kevin later said. “I was thinking, ‘Oh, wow.’”
Breslin was already having misgivings after the first day of shooting, when he chanced to encounter the superagent Sue Mengers at a restaurant. Her clients included the then-little-known actor Gene Hackman, who had been trying to get the Popeye Doyle part.
“My mother told me she trapped my father against a wall, cursing at him: ‘‘You’re taking food out of my client’s mouth! You’re not an actor!” Kevin reports.
Jimmy echoed some of that sentiment back home.
“It was, ‘I’ve got to write. I’m a writer. I’m not an actor. What am I doing? I’ve got to write,” Kevin recalls.
Jimmy was ready to quit, but Rosemary energetically reminded him that he could not just give the money back because it was gone. He then noticed something that had not been in the script until a week before shooting began. Friedkin had added a high-speed car chase extending under the elevated subway trucks on McDonald Avenue in Brooklyn.
Here was something Friedkin could not just shrug away, as he had when Breslin sought to get out of his contract by saying he was a writer not an actor.
“He was also not a driver,” Kevin said.
James affirmed, “Popeye Doyle had to drive a car… My father never set foot behind the wheel of a car in his life.”
James added, “Nobody would have thought to ask him. You assume people f---ing drive, right?”
Jimmy was out. Hackman got the part, which included the harrowing car chase. He was most definitely an actor.
After Hackman received that year’s Academy Award for best actor in a leading role, the phone rang in the Breslin house. Friedkin was calling.
“It was Billy,” Kevin remembered. “He goes, ‘Jimmy, that was your Academy Award. That was your Oscar.’ I think my father said to him, ‘Billy, I’m a writer.’”
Jimmy got the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1986. He died in 2017, leaving one unresolved issue from his nano-career as a movie actor.
“I don’t think he gave back the money,” Kevin reported.
Hackman had proceeded from The French Connection to numerous other roles, winning an Oscar In 1992 for best supporting actor in Unforgiven. He gave his all to every role until he retired in 2004. He was found dead along with his wife and a dog in his New Mexico home on Wednesday. The cause of death was still being investigated on Thursday.
What is certain is that Hackman, like Breslin, will be remembered as one of the immortals of their chosen calling.
“What a fantastic actor,” James said. “He seemed like somebody from another period of time in life when it was a little more focused and simplified.”
James then spoke of Hackman as his father might have written.
“He certainly was worth going to the movies for,” James said. “I’ll put it that way.”
