When Gene Hackman was a child...: The problems of celebrity trauma biography

CATEGORY: POPULAR CULTURE

Gene Hackman in The French Connection

Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
On February 26, 2025, the body of Gene Hackman was discovered. Many obituaries repeated the story that childhood trauma made him who he was. One story was titled “The Early Trauma That Fueled Gene Hackman’s Singular Genius.”
Trauma Biography Myth
​When 13-years-old, Hackman, his younger brother, and father were living with his grandmother. While playing in the street, his dad drove past and waved casually without melodrama, abandoning his sons allegedly without explanation. The article asserted this was a devastating childhood trauma seared into Hackman’s psyche: “You can see it for yourself in the waves Hackman exchanges with Fernando Rey in The French Connection” (photo above).
Hackman seemed to believe this narrative explained why he became an actor. In 2013, he told a reporter, “I doubt I would’ve become so sensitive to human behavior if that hadn’t happened to me as a child — if I hadn’t realized how much one small gesture can mean.”

Stories like Hackman’s are a ubiquitous form of trauma biography in the backgrounds of famous people in which childhood events, bad or good, caused their destinies. A few examples include Kevin Costner became a daydreamer because his father’s job required the family to move frequently. Marilyn Monroe became an unstable personality which caused her to become an actress because she lived in multiple foster homes.
In the recent biography of Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson wrote, “The PTSD from his childhood also instilled in him an aversion to contentment.” Isaacson simply asserted Musk has PTSD. Several childhood events were described that might be considered trauma (beatings from bullying, verbal rants from his father, and witnessed community violence in South Africa), but Isaacson  neither bothered to specify which event gave Musk PTSD nor asked whether Musk considered any of the events traumatic. Musk has made it clear he has never been to a therapist (and has therefore never been diagnosed). Yet Isaacson was comfortable assuming Musk had PTSD, as if implying, how could any human not have PTSD from that childhood?
 
The concern about trauma biography is the erroneous claim that childhood trauma shapes an individual’s fundamental personality development. Failing to observe the simplest of scientific principles that correlation is not causation, biographers seem oblivious that there is no credible evidence that the hard-wired, genetically-based process of human personality development can be derailed by a handful of life events.
 
Intergenerational Trauma Myth
Another popular belief is claiming that parents’ trauma gets passed down to children. Julian Lennon felt rejected when his famous dad, John Lennon, had little contact with him, and this was somehow an inevitable cycle because John’s father had abandoned him as a child.
Tyler Perry appears to have suffered real trauma as a child when beaten by his father. But Perry insisted that his public telling of it must include that his father had been orphaned and was beaten by the husband of the couple that took him in, and the husband had been mistreated as a slave. Each generation of beating somehow embedded into the psyche and biology to create new involuntary beatings in the next generation.
The son of Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould believes he has somehow inherited intergenerational trauma from both parents. His mother lost her father as an infant and her step-father was abusive. His father’s mother had trauma. The son has stated, “How could that not affect him, and, therefore, affect me? How could my mother’s trauma not, therefore, affect me? It has, even in ways that I’m sure they’re not even conscious of.”
There is no credible scientific evidence in humans that these stories could be true, and the mechanism of the mysterious transmission through generations is completely unknown (see here).

Trauma cannot alter human personality development. Trauma cannot be passed down generations like some sort of neo-Lamarckism genetic inheritance.

Both fallacies share the underlying belief that humans are incredibly fragile. This is a perverted view of human nature that is held by a subset of the population whose worldview attributes negative outcomes in life to environment instead of acknowledging that individual differences can be primarily genetic. Both are trying to transform the way we think about human beings as fragile instead of resilient.​

Trauma Dispatch has been documenting how the worldview of this subset is leveraged by activists in academia, media, and politics for policy changes in schools, governments, and social agencies. Popular culture of celebrity lives is another powerful medium for this worldview.