Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza confirmed just after midnight Thursday the couple had died, along with their dog.
Mendoza said in an interview Wednesday evening there was no immediate indication of foul play. He did not provide a cause of death or say when the couple might have died.
Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the couple’s home on Old Sunset Trail, in a gated community off Hyde Park Road just north of Ten Thousands Waves, on Wednesday afternoon to investigate the deaths of two elderly people and a dog. It was unclear whether the deputies were responding to a report of the deaths or if they were making a welfare check at the home.
The deputies discovered the bodies of a man in his 90s and a woman in her 60s, Mendoza initially reported.
“All I can say is that we’re in the middle of a preliminary death investigation, waiting on approval of a search warrant,” the sheriff said Wednesday evening, before his agency had positively identified the pair.
“I want to assure the community and neighborhood that there’s no immediate danger to anyone,” he said.
Born Jan. 30, 1930, in San Bernardino, Calif., Hackman won numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, over the course of his long career. Among his many famous roles were Detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in 1971’s The French Connection, for which he won the Oscar for best actor, and Sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett in the 1992 Clint Eastwood film Unforgiven, for which he won the best supporting actor award.
In other well-known roles, Hackman played Clyde’s brother Buck Barrow in 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, an FBI agent investigating the murder of civil rights activists in Mississippi Burning in 1988 and Lex Luthor in several Superman movies in the 1970s and 1980s.
He was married to his first wife, Faye Maltese, from 1956 to 1986, and the couple had three children — Christopher, Elizabeth and Leslie, according to People.
He moved to Santa Fe in the 1980s and was often seen around town in his first few decades in the city. He served as a board member of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in the 1990s, and gave remarks when the museum opened its doors in 1997, according to a report in The New Mexican.
“In the 10 years I’ve lived here, I’ve been taken with the excitement and indomitable spirit of this place,” he said at the time.
The Tesuque restaurant El Nido was reportedly a favorite spot for Hackman, who frequently appeared in The New Mexican‘s popular “El Mitote” column on celebrity sightings and gossip, which ran for decades before it ended in 2018.
He rarely went out publicly in his last years, though his few public appearances at times made headlines. When he attended a show at the Lensic in 2018, the British newspaper The Independent wrote about it.
Hackman caused a stir in downtown Santa Fe in 2012, when police said the film star stuck a homeless man in self-defense. The New Mexican reported Hackman told police the man had threatened him and his wife and had called his wife a vulgar name.
The two men had known each other, according to a report of the incident.
No one was charged in the incident, which appeared in news reports nationwide.
The New York Post published a story about Hackman doing yard work, pumping gas and getting a chicken sandwich at a local Wendy’s in 2023. Last year, the paper ran another story about a sighting of Hackman and his wife, this time eating at a seafood restaurant in Albuquerque.
Hackman turned to writing in his later years. He and fellow Santa Fean Daniel Lenihan wrote several books together, the first in 1999. The pair published Escape From Andersonville: A Novel of the Civil War in 2008. Hackman then wrote two novels on his own, Payback at Morning Peak, published in 2011, and Pursuit in 2013.
Nathan Brown and Cynthia Miller of The New Mexican contributed to this report.