Gene Hackman was 25 and entirely unknown when he met Faye Maltese at a Y.M.C.A. in New York in 1955, according to The New York Times. Hackman married Maltese the following year, shortly before he moved back to his native California as an aspiring actor and enrolled at the Pasadena Playhouse, where he befriended the equally unknown Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall, as Vanity Fairdetailed.
Soon after, Hackman and Maltese returned to New York City, where the actor found work in Off-Broadway plays. Hackman started to find meaningful parts in the 1960s and before the decade closed, the actor earned his first Academy Award for his supporting role in “Bonnie & Clyde.” That’s also when he admittedly started to neglect his wife and three children. “You become very selfish as an actor,” he told The New York Times in 1989. ”You spend so many years wanting desperately to be recognized as having the talent and then when you’re starting to be offered these parts, it’s very tough to turn anything down.”
In search of success, Hackman accepted work that required him to be off on location for months on end. “Even though I had a family, I took jobs that would separate us for three or four months at a time,” he added. By 1986, he and Maltese had divorced. “The temptations in that, the money and recognition, it was too much for the poor boy in me,” he said.