William Hurt Is No More
By Telegraph Obituaries
William Hurt with his Oscar in 1986 - Credit: ABC Photo Archives
William Hurt, who has died of cancer aged 71, made his name on stage and screen as a rigorous, intelligent leading man, capable of lending an air of refinement to even the most humdrum production.
Tall, blond and diffidently handsome, he broke through with an exceptional run of 1980s films that made full use of his good looks and versatility. In Body Heat (1981), he was the lawyer headed crotch-first towards destruction via the femme fatale Kathleen Turner; he won the Best Actor Academy Award for playing the cross-dressing Luis Molina, the incarcerated narrator of Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985); and then underlined his pin-up credentials as James, the sensitive speech tutor courting Marlee Matlin in Children of a Lesser God (1986), transforming sudsy material into a thinking person’s weepie.
His upright posture invited mocking, and Hurt gamely caught the spirit of James L Brooks’s enduring media comedy Broadcast News (1987) as the television news anchorman Tom Grunick, the prettiest yet stiffest corner of the film’s indelibly etched love triangle.
Less sympathetic observers wondered whether that stiffness was in fact early-onset woodenness, but Hurt persistently tested and reinvented himself over his long screen career.
In 2006 he earned the first Oscar nomination for an actor in a comic-book adaptation with an astonishing extended cameo as a Mob boss in A History of Violence, in which his natural coolness hardened into throat-seizing viciousness. Hurt maintained that he was only doing his job: “You know, if you do the work right, everybody’s vivid. Every life is vivid. That’s what we’re trying to say, right?”
William McChord Hurt was born on March 20 1950 into a worldly and well-connected Washington household. With his father, Alfred McChord Hurt, an official in the State Department, the young William travelled to Guam, Lahore, Mogadishu and Khartoum (he had been conceived during an earlier trip to Shanghai). Hurt’s parents split when he was a young child and in 1960 his mother Claire (née McGill), an editorial assistant at Time magazine, married Henry Luce III, son of the Time founder Henry Luce and the diplomat Clare Boothe Luce.
Acting on stage presented young William with some degree of stability. When he graduated from the smart Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1968, he did so as vice-president of the school’s dramatic society, the yearbook predicting: “With characteristics such as [his], you might even see him on Broadway.”
Somewhat circuitously, that prediction was borne out. The scholarly Hurt headed to Tufts University to study Theology, only to fall in with a different crowd. After marrying the actress Mary Beth Hurt in 1971, he signed up to study drama the following year at Juilliard, where classmates included Christopher Reeve and Robin Williams .
Plunging into summer stock amid the chaos of the 1970s, he caught eyes at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival of 1975; upon graduating from Juilliard, he joined New York’s Circle Repertory Company. This immersion in theatrical life shaped his philosophy: “I had done 60 plays [including an acclaimed Hamlet in 1979] before I did a movie… I didn’t want [the work] to be superficial, so I slowed down instead of speeding up.”
The approach paid off. After gathering some on-camera experience in a 1977 episode of Kojak, Hurt landed his first film role in a ready-made cult classic: Ken Russell ’s hallucinogenic head-trip Altered States (1980), where the actor’s intensity meshed entirely with Russell’s lunatic vision.
A shrewd reader of scripts, Hurt barely made a bad choice early on, succeeding in carving out a viable career as a thoughtful romantic lead at a time when American cinema was becoming the domain of steroidal action men.
He demonstrated easy chemistry with his co-stars: a good match with Sigourney Weaver in Eyewitness (1981), he burned up the screen with Turner in Body Heat, and – despite mutterings about his Methody approach – slotted nicely into the epochal ensemble of The Big Chill (1983).
Some turbulence followed this initial rise to prominence. Hurt divorced Mary Beth in 1982, having moved in with Sandra Jennings the previous year, but he finally achieved his dream of appearing on Broadway – and won a Tony – with Mike Nichols ’s all-star 1984 production of David Rabe’s bruising Hollywood melodrama Hurlyburly. In his film choices, Hurt was becoming only more adventurous, waiving his fee and flying out to Brazil (where he was threatened by armed robbers) to occupy that early trans role in Kiss of the Spider Woman.
The Oscar was reward for the risk, yet Hurt wrestled with the stardom it conferred upon him, asking Sally Field, who presented him with the gong: “Sally, what the hell do I do with this?” (Her response: “You live with it.”)
The 1990s found Hurt in steady employment, but the erstwhile young swain was beginning to appear patrician or professorial: his Rochester in Franco Zeffirelli ’s dingy Jane Eyre (1996) was the closest he came to a romantic lead.
It felt natural that he should gravitate into Woody Allen’s universe with Alice (1990), but his judgment had been clouded by heavy drinking, and his selectivity began to count against him: he turned down both the James Caan role in Misery (1990) and the Sam Neill role in Jurassic Park (1993).
His adventurousness flirted with waywardness, meanwhile, carrying him into Wim Wenders’s unfathomable Until the End of the World (1991), to Wales for the glum Second Best (1994) and into space for the so-so spectacle Lost in Space (1998).
He had settled into middle age by the millennium, remaining on casting agents’ radars as an indicator of class in supporting roles: as Professor Hobby in Spielberg’s singular AI (2001), Samuel L Jackson’s sponsor in Changing Lanes (2002), one of the paranoid townsfolk in M Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004).
These were flashes of quiet genius, but those 10 minutes in A History of Violence were lightning in a bottle, testament to the director David Cronenberg’s ability both to mold pulp into viscerally affecting art, and to guide a perpetual worrywart of a performer through his offscreen concerns. As Hurt confessed, “[Cronenberg] was so kind with me. I arrived 10 days early. I filmed only for a couple of days. I’m of the belief there are no small roles. Only small actors.”
The Oscar nomination ensured him regular work in end-of-year awards bait: he reappeared among the ensembles of Syriana (2005) and the Robert De Niro-directed The Good Shepherd (2006), and was touching as the doomed Chris McCandless’s distant father Walt in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007).
By the end of the decade, he had embraced the authority roles he had long seemed destined to play, facing an assassination threat as the US president in the tricksy thriller Vantage Point (2008) and – most profitably of all – assuming the military garb of General Thaddeus E “Thunderbolt” Ross within the Marvel universe, first in The Incredible Hulk (2008) and then in Captain America: Civil War (2016): latter-day ensemble work, offering the kind of pay cheques that can steady an ageing actor’s nerves.
In later life, Hurt moved back to Oregon, where he flew planes and quit the drinking that had earned him a difficult reputation; he renewed an apology to Marlee Matlin after revelations emerged in her 2009 memoir of off-screen physical abuse during their two-year relationship.
He mixed film work with theatre gigs and blue-chip television fare, including the twisty legal saga Damages (2009); he earned a Golden Globe nomination for playing the US Treasury secretary Henry Paulson in HBO’s Too Big to Fail (2011); and most recently played Billy Bob Thornton’s sinister former legal partner, who has a scarred face and conducts meetings in darkened rooms, in Amazon’s enigmatic crime series Goliath (2016-21).
In interviews, Hurt grew more reflective yet: “When you’re a kid, you’re beset by fears and you think, ‘I’ll solve the fear by living forever and becoming a movie star.’ But I’m not going to live forever. And the more I know it, the more amazed I am by being here at all. I am so thrilled by the privilege of life, and yet at the same time I know I have to let it go.”
He is survived by a son with Susan Jennings, two sons with Heidi Henderson and a daughter with the director, actress and screenwriter Sandrine Bonnaire. - Telegraph
