As /Film's Jeremy Smith has argued before, Gene Hackman was the best actor ever. With Hackman's death at 95 on February 26, the world is busy remembering the man and his best movies, all of which feature great Hackman roles that are so defined by the actor's presence that it would be very difficult to envision anyone else playing his characters.

If you asked Hackman himself, however, he wasn't always the best fit for the roles he's remembered by. In fact, the actor went as far as thinking that his arguably most famous role, Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle in "The French Connection" (1971), was not a very good fit for him. Here's how he described this somewhat surprising view in an interview with Cigar Aficionado:

"When we first started, I was pretty unsure of myself, because [Doyle] had to be pretty ruthless. In the early parts of the filming, I just wasn't up to it.