On the Mount Rushmore of great American actors — specifically those who emerged in the late 1960s and brought a transformative, bone-deep intensity to their craft over the industry-redefining decade that followed — four faces loom large: Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman.

The eldest of that contingent, Hackman is less familiar to young audiences than the others, having withdrawn from acting more than 20 years ago, in order to write and paint in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Over an four-decade screen career, the stage-trained star gravitated to complex movies for grown-up audiences (the only significant exception being his iconic turn as Lex Luthor in the “Superman” franchise), and might have been entirely forgotten by Gen Z, if not for his performance as the gruff patriarch in Wes Anderson’s cult favorite “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

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