SANTA FE, N.M. — Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman, his wife and their dog were found dead in different rooms of their Santa Fe home, and they had been dead for some time, according to investigators.

Hackman, 95, was found Wednesday in a mudroom and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, 63, was found in a bathroom next to a space heater, Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office detectives wrote in a search warrant. There was an open prescription bottle and pills scattered on a countertop near Arakawa.

Denise Avila, a sheriff’s office spokesperson, said there was no indication that any of them had been shot or had other types of wounds.

The New Mexico Gas Co. is working with the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office in the investigation, utility spokesperson Tim Korte said. The utility tested the gas lines in and around the home after the bodies were discovered, according to the warrant. At the time, it didn’t find any signs of problems.

A worker reported that the front door to the house was open when he arrived for routine maintenance and that he called police after finding the bodies. A dead German shepherd was found in a bathroom closet near Arakawa, police said. Two healthy dogs were found on the property.

Hackman was a frequent and versatile presence on screen from the 1960s until his retirement. His dozens of films included the Academy Award favorites “The French Connection” and “Unforgiven,” a breakout performance in “Bonnie and Clyde,” a classic bit of farce in “Young Frankenstein,” a turn as the comic book villain Lex Luthor in “Superman” and the title character in Wes Anderson’s 2001 “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

He seemed capable of any kind of role — whether an uptight buffoon in “Birdcage,” a college coach finding redemption in the sentimental favorite “Hoosiers” or a secretive surveillance expert in Francis Ford Coppola’s Watergate-era release “The Conversation.”

Although self-effacing and unfashionable, Hackman held special status within Hollywood — heir to Spencer Tracy as an everyman, actor’s actor, curmudgeon and reluctant celebrity. He embodied the ethos of doing his job, doing it very well and letting others worry about his image. Beyond the obligatory appearances at awards ceremonies, he was rarely seen on the social circuit.

He was an early retiree — essentially done, by choice, with movies by his mid-70s — and a late bloomer.

Hackman was 37 when “Bonnie and Clyde” was released and past 40 when he won his first Oscar, as the rules-bending New York City detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in the 1971 thriller about tracking down Manhattan drug smugglers, “The French Connection.”

The most famous sequence was dangerously realistic: A car chase in which Doyle speeds under elevated train tracks, his brown Pontiac (driven by a stuntman) screeching into areas that the filmmakers had not received permits for. When Doyle crashes into a white Ford, it wasn’t a stuntman driving the other car, but a New York City resident who didn’t know a movie was being made.

When Clint Eastwood first offered him the role of Little Bill Daggett, the corrupt town boss in “Unforgiven,” Hackman turned it down. But he realized that Eastwood was planning to make a different kind of Western — a critique, not a celebration of violence. The film won him the Academy Award as best supporting actor of 1992.

Eugene Allen Hackman was born Jan. 30, 1930, in San Bernardino, California, and grew up in Danville, Illinois, where his father worked as a pressman for the Commercial-News. His parents fought repeatedly, and his father often used his fists on Gene to take out his rage. The boy found refuge in movie houses, identifying with such screen rebels as Errol Flynn and James Cagney as his role models.

When Gene was 13, his father waved goodbye and drove off, never to return. The abandonment left lasting scars. His mother had become an alcoholic and was constantly at odds with her mother, with whom the shattered family lived; Gene had a younger brother, actor Richard Hackman. At 16, he “suddenly got the itch to get out.” Lying about his age, he enlisted in the U.S. Marines.

His brawling and resistance to authority led to his being demoted from corporal three times. His taste for show business was whetted when he became disc jockey and news announcer on his unit’s radio station.

With a high school degree he earned during his time as a Marine, Hackman enrolled in journalism at the University of Illinois. He dropped out after six months to study radio announcing in New York. After working at stations in Florida and Danville, he returned to New York to study painting at the Art Students League. Hackman switched again to enter an acting course at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Back in New York, he found work as a doorman and truck driver among other jobs waiting for a break as an actor, sweating it out with such hopefuls as Robert Duvall and Dustin Hoffman. Summer work at a theater on Long Island led to off-Broadway roles and Hackman began attracting attention from Broadway producers.

He received good notices in such plays as “Any Wednesday” with Sandy Dennis, and “Poor Richard” with Alan Bates. During a tryout for another play, Hackman was seen by film director Robert Rossen, who hired him for a brief role in “Lilith,” which starred Warren Beatty and Jean Seberg. He played small roles in other films, including “Hawaii,”and leads in television dramas, such as “The Defenders” and “Naked City,” before Beatty helped change his career.

When Beatty began work on “Bonnie and Clyde,” which he produced and starred in, he remembered Hackman and cast him as bank robber Clyde Barrow’s outgoing brother, Buck.

Pauline Kael in The New Yorker called Hackman’s work “a beautifully controlled performance, the best in the film,” and he was nominated for an Academy Award as supporting actor.

Hackman’s first starring film role came in 1970 with “I Never Sang for My Father,” as a man struggling to deal with a failed relationship with his dying father, Melvyn Douglas.

Even though he had the central part, Hackman was Oscar-nominated as supporting actor and Douglas as lead. The following year he won the Oscar as best actor for “The French Connection.”

In 1956, Hackman married Fay Maltese, a bank teller he had met at a YMCA dance in New York. They had a son, Christopher, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Leslie, but divorced in the mid-1980s. In 1991 he married Arakawa, a classical pianist. In his latter years, he wrote novels and lived on his ranch in Santa Fe.