Cerebral actor who dazzled Hollywood in the 1980s
William Hurt 1950-2022
William Hurt, who has died aged 71, was once described as having inherited Robert Redford’s position as the “all-American blond Adonis who was neither jock nor jerk”. Tall and lean with piercing blue eyes and a pronounced cleft chin, he conveyed a cerebral intensity, and had the “distinctive drawl – slow, nuanced, enunciated – of a stage-trained actor”, said the FT. In fact, Hurt was exclusively a stage actor until he was 30, and he often seemed “bemused, even amused, to find himself steering films in the semi-artistic sidecurrents of mainstream Hollywood”.
During a heady period in the 1980s, Hurt struck gold with every film: he was the hapless lawyer in the erotic thriller Body Heat; and a scarred Vietnam vet at a reunion of college friends in The Big Chill. He won an Oscar for his role as a gay man locked in a South American jail in
Kiss of the Spider Woman, and was nominated for his next two roles: a teacher in Children of a Lesser God, and a narcissistic TV anchorman in Broadcast News. His career as a leading man started to fall off in the 1990s, said The Times, amid rumours that he was difficult to work with. But Hurt, who was “never one to under-theorise”, insisted that he was only trying to do his job. This, he argued, was not to make the audience think or feel in a particular way, but to interpret the truth of the whole piece. “I give more by solving the truth than by pandering to expectations and facile hopes,” he said.
Hurt tried to keep his personal life private, but it was clearly complicated. He drank heavily for years, and he suffered from logorrhoea, for which he took lithium. One journalist who interviewed him described the process as like trying to squash a balloon into a matchbox. He was married and divorced twice, and one of his other relationships ended in a notorious palimony case. Then, in 2009, Marlee Matlin, his co-star in Children of a Lesser
God, accused him of sexual and physical abuse during their two-year relationship. She had been only 19 when it began; he was 35. He did not deny her allegations, and said, “I did and do apologise for any pain I caused.”
He was born in 1950 to Claire (née McGill), an assistant at Time magazine and Alfred Hurt, a diplomat. His father’s job meant he travelled widely as a child, but his parents divorced when he was six. His mother then married her boss – and they moved into a huge apartment on New York’s Upper East Side. He loved acting at school, but studied theology at Tufts before enrolling at the Juilliard School. He appeared in 60 plays – including an acclaimed Hamlet – before making his film debut in Ken Russell’s Altered States in 1980. Latterly, he had become known to younger audiences as Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross in two Marvel superhero films; he also won a final Oscar nomination, for his role as a terrifying villain in A History of
Violence (2005). In 2018, he revealed that he was suffering from terminal cancer. He is survived by his children.