Originally appeared on E! Online
Though gone, Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa’s love will live on.
The couple, aged 95 and 64, were found dead in their Santa Fe, New Mexico, home alongside their dog on Feb. 26, the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office confirmed to NBC News.
Despite the heartbreaking circumstances of their communal deaths, the Sheriff’s office shared in their statement that “foul play is not suspected as a factor” in the couple’s passing, though an investigation remains active and ongoing.
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The couple began dating in the mid 1980s after Arakawa and Hackman—who had previously been married to Faye Maltese, with whom he shared three children—met at a California fitness center where Arakawa had been working part-time. They married in 1991.
Hackman, for his part, had been candid about the dissolution of his first marriage to Faye, which was plagued by separations, per The New York Times, before an eventual divorce in 1986.
READ Gene Hackman, Wife Betsy Arakawa and Dog Found Dead in Santa Fe Home
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''You become very selfish as an actor,'' he told the NYT in the 1989 interview. ''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. Even though I had a family, I took jobs that would separate us for three or four months at a time.”
But when it came to his relationship with Arakawa, of whom he was 31 years her senior, the Unforgiven actor was clear there was no cause and effect.
“I did not leave my real-life wife for a younger woman,” he told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in 2021. “We just drifted apart. We lost sight of each other. When you work in this business, marriage takes a great deal of work and love.”
In Santa Fe—a city Hackman fell in love with after working on movies there, telling Architectural Digest in 1990 the location had a “kind of magic” to it—Hackman and Arakawa built their dream home. It was also there that Arakawa, born in Hawaii, was the co-owner of a home furnishing business, per Newsweek. Prior to her transition into entrepreneurship, Arakawa had also built a career as a classic pianist.
The outlet noted that during the home’s renovation, Hackman and Arakawa were heavily involved in the process, often staying on site or pestering the team with phone calls.
“We bought a few things in Santa Fe,” Hackman shared of decorating the home. “Other things came from auctions in New York, an antiques shop in Germany that Betsy and I found, and from Los Angeles.”
It was there the couple quietly led their deeply private lives, enjoying ritual Friday night date nights and staying out of the spotlight as Hackman pursued other outlets such as painting and writing. Of the latter, the Academy Award winner—who wrote a number of novels before his passing—credited his wife with helping his writing process.
As he joked in a 2014 interview with the Writer’s Bone, “If in fact I have a style, it came from repeated edits, friends' suggestions, and my wife's unwavering, specific read-throughs.”
