Gene Hackman: The Portrayal as Portraiture : Movies: From cameos like ‘Postcards From the Edge’ to star turns like ‘Narrow Margin,’ the actor instinctually quarries the ore of character.

Whatever its tensile strength as a story, “Postcards From the Edge” is an incandescent display of acting, with a garland of cameos enhancing the extravagant main outings by Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine as daughter and mother. And none of the supporting performances has more substance and power than Gene Hackman’s as a hard-line moviemaker with a gift for tough love.

Hackman, tossing a drug pusher off a location and threatening to kill his spaced-out star unless she shapes up, could have modeled the director on one or several he’s worked with, including Richard Donner of the first “Superman” movie.

What is interesting is that in a film in which some of the cameos are played for their hey-look-who’s-here-now amusement, Hackman delivers a character--fully rounded, publicly irascible and efficient, privately tender and helpfully tough. He’s not on screen much more than five minutes altogether, but it’s enough for the purposes of the film and the portrayal.

Hackman has been delivering characters, a variety as various as Lex Luthor in “Superman” and the FBI man in “Mississippi Burning,” for a long time now, and he has created a niche for himself as the star who is a character actor, the leading actor as a portraitist.

There really isn’t a Gene Hackman character as there was, say, a John Wayne character or a Cary Grant character. He seems to start from scratch each time out. (There have been a lot of times out. Hackman, like Michael Caine, is a screen workaholic.) He plays the doers, most often a professional man arising somewhere within upper-blue-collar and lower-white-collar turf. He’s the unaverage average man.

When he first started acting classes in New York, Hackman said one morning in a rented home in the Santa Monica Mountains, his coach told him, “You’ll be a good character actor.” And, Hackman says, “I accepted it. I never thought about it. But it’s a mistake to think of yourself that way. There’s no reason you can’t be a leading man no matter how you look.

“You think of leading men as being handsome, but that’s never necessarily been true. Bogart wasn’t classically handsome. It can be detrimental to be too handsome. If John Derek, say, wasn’t quite so handsome, he might have had more interesting things to do as an actor.”

Hackman also plays a Los Angeles deputy district attorney in “Narrow Margin,” a Peter Hyams remake of a classic crime thriller in which Hackman tries to get murder witness Anne Archer safely back to trial. He and she are trapped aboard a transcontinental train, playing cat and mouse with a couple of hired killers.

The two stars did some undoubled stunt work atop the moving train. “We were tied to a cable by our ankles,” Hackman says, “but it’s still an unpleasant fall if it happens. Anne had never done any stunts before. She’s a gutsy lady. You always think of that kind of thing as something for somebody else to do.”

Although it’s a genre film, Hyams’ script is rich with character-revealing dialogue for both actors, and hero and heroine become individuals, not types.

Hackman talked about a scene in “Narrow Margin” in which he laughs off an attempted bribe by one of the hit men (James B. Sikking). Hackman’s contemptuously grinning rejection of the offer charges a static scene with high excitement and amusement.

“You can’t really write the scene as it plays, or direct it, really,” Hackman says. “When you’re hired as an actor, you’re expected to bring something with you, not just to learn the lines. To make the scene and the character work, you have to be alive, alert; you have to make choices. No director in the world can make those choices. He can reject what he doesn’t like, but they’re yours.

“You have to go with your guts, your instincts, your sense of who the character is. You’re using your craft eventually, but all the craft in the world won’t help you make those choices.

“That’s what’s fun about the business,” Hackman says. “You’re using your sense of truth to make a moment come real.”

Hackman will soon be out in “Class Action,” co-starring with Mary Ellen Mastrantonio as father and daughter lawyers--she a corporate type, he working in a scruffier world. He is also co-starring with Mikhail Baryshnikov in “Patriots,” a spy thriller whose title may change.

Friends kid him about working so much, Hackman says. But he has a simple, non-financial answer. “I love doing the work. I like the challenge. When I’m actually there working I love the pressure of trying to make a scene work, trying to create a character.

“The rest of it’s not a lot of fun, the business aspects of it. And the waiting gets to you. You come ready to work and full of ideas at 8 in the morning, and it may be four or five hours before you work. You have to learn to deal with it.”

He has no plans to work again, however, until February or March. He and his son are building an airplane from a kit. Hackman learned to fly during days off when he was shooting “Hawaii” in 1965.

The actor reads three or four books a week (“mostly junk”) but not many scripts.

“Lots of actors love to read scripts. I never did. If I read one it starts working on me. I start thinking about what could be done with it, how it could be fixed.” He’d as soon leave the fixing to others. Hackman is also happy to leave it to others to define his position in films.

“People need to say, ‘He’s this type, or that type.’ The easiest thing for me to say is I’m an actor. Period.”