Gene Hackman’s 3 Kids Are All In Their 60s Now—Inside Their Quiet Lives Today

On December 10, 1978, Washington turned out in black tie for the presidential premiere of Superman at the Kennedy Center, and Gene Hackman, 48 and fresh from playing the gleefully vain Lex Luthor, did not come alone. Photographers from the Ron Galella Collection caught him that night with his children, and People and Hello! both ran a frame of him beside his daughter Elizabeth, who was 16. For a man who guarded his private life the way Luthor guarded his lair, it was one of the few times the public got a good look at the Hackman kids.

That girl at the premiere and her two siblings are all in their 60s now. Gene Hackman’s children never followed him into stardom, and they spent most of their lives out of the headlines until February 2025, when the deaths of their father and his wife Betsy Arakawa in Santa Fe pulled them into the news. Their story has a few surprises, including the moment one of them quietly changed the course of a best picture winner.

Why Gene Hackman Said Fame Was Tough On His Children

Hackman married Faye Maltese in 1956, years before anyone in Hollywood knew his name. Their son Christopher Allen arrived in 1960, daughter Elizabeth Jean followed in August 1962, and Leslie Anne, the baby of the family, was born in October 1966, according to People. By the time Leslie was a toddler, Bonnie and Clyde had earned her father his first Oscar nomination, and The French Connection brought him the statuette a few years later.

The success came at a price, and Hackman never pretended otherwise. “Even though I had a family, I took jobs that would separate us for three or four months at a time,” he once admitted, as Hello! recounted, adding that the money and recognition were “too much for the poor boy in me.” He was blunter still with the Irish Independent in 2000. “It’s tough being the son or daughter of a celebrity,” he said. “I couldn’t always be home with them when they were growing up.”

Gene and Faye divorced in 1986 after 30 years of marriage, and Faye died in 2017. Hackman married classical pianist Betsy Arakawa in 1991, and the couple eventually settled into the quiet Santa Fe life he preferred. His kids, as he told the Irish Independent, were living in California. The oldest of them had once tried to follow him onto the stage.

Christopher Hackman Once Wanted To Be An Actor

Christopher, who is now 66, is the only son and the child Hackman spoke about with the most candor. “My son thought he wanted to be an actor at one time and was in New York, and I wrote him a couple of little monologues,” Hackman told Empire in 2020, and Newsweek noted that those short scenes were how the actor first started writing, years before he published novels in retirement. His IMDb listing credits a Christopher Hackman on the camera and electrical crew of Hoosiers, the 1986 basketball classic his father starred in, but he never built a public career in front of the camera.

Hackman admitted the long shoots cost him some of that bond. “I lost touch with my son in terms of advice early on,” he told GQ in 2011. The affection never went away, though. In a 1984 interview he put it simply: “No, we still hug to this day, and I thank God that we are able to do that.”

Christopher has given no interviews since his father’s death. His name surfaced in March 2025 when TMZ reported, and People and InvestmentNews repeated, that he had hired California trust and estate attorney Andrew M. Katzenstein, which led to talk that he might challenge part of the estate. His sisters, meanwhile, became the family’s public voice.

How Elizabeth And Leslie Spoke For The Family

Hackman, 95, and Arakawa, 65, were found in their Santa Fe home on February 26, 2025. In March, New Mexico’s chief medical investigator, Dr. Heather Jarrell, announced that Arakawa had died of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome and was last known to be alive on February 11. Hackman, who had advanced Alzheimer’s disease, died of heart disease around February 18, about a week later, as CNN and the Associated Press reported. Our own coverage of how investigators pieced together that timeline followed the case as it unfolded.

The day after the news broke, Elizabeth and Leslie released a statement with Hackman’s granddaughter Annie. “He was loved and admired by millions around the world for his brilliant acting career, but to us he was always just Dad and Grandpa,” they told TheWrap, adding that they were devastated by his death.

Leslie, who turned 60 last month, had been her father’s date at the 1984 Golden Globes and the 1991 premiere of Class Action. She told the Daily Mail she hadn’t spoken with him in a couple of months but that “everything was normal and everything was good,” and she was generous about her stepmother. “I give credit to his wife, Betsy, for keeping him alive,” she said. Elizabeth, now 64, was the one handling the hardest calls. Police bodycam footage released that March showed her asking deputies to cremate the couple’s dog Zinna and bury her with Arakawa, a request we reported at the time, and asking that the dog’s collar be saved for her.

The estate has stayed unsettled. Hackman’s 2005 will left everything to Arakawa, while her will directed what she left to a charitable trust “for purposes beneficial to the community,” People reported, and the court papers identify his three children as his heirs. Most of his assets sit in a private trust whose beneficiaries have never been made public, so nobody outside the family knows what the kids will receive. As of July 2026, Page Six reported, personal representative Julia L. Peters was still keeping the case open while tax matters were settled. That legal back and forth is the least of what one Hackman daughter will be remembered for.

The Hackman Daughter Who Said ‘Daddy, You’re Not Making This Movie’

In the late 1980s, Hackman owned the rights to Thomas Harris’s novel The Silence of the Lambs and planned to direct it and play Hannibal Lecter himself. Then, as literary agent Bob Bookman told Deadline for the film’s 25th anniversary, one of his daughters read the book and called him with a verdict. “Daddy, you’re not making this movie,” she said. Hackman walked away from the project, Orion handed it to Jonathan Demme, and Anthony Hopkins won the Oscar for the role in 1992.

Demme never forgot who he owed. “God bless Gene Hackman’s daughter, if that’s true, and that’s what I’ve always heard,” the director said in the same oral history. Neither sister has ever publicly claimed the credit, and the family has never said which of them made the call.

It may be the truest picture of the Hackman kids. They kept their names out of the papers for nearly five decades, lived their own lives away from the cameras and let their father have the spotlight. When it counted, one of them was the only critic he needed, and on the night the world said goodbye, all they wanted anyone to know was that the man in the tuxedo at the Superman premiere was simply Dad.