Little was known about him, and he was imagined in terms of the men he portrayed: the surly reluctant travel writer in The Travels of Mr. Leary (1988), the somnambulist writer in Smoke (1995), the wounded war veterans and drug dealers in The Big Frustration (1983), even that Luis Moreno in The Kiss of the Spider Woman in Hector Babenco’s film, for which he won an Oscar in 1986. William Hurt played vulnerable, sensitive intellectuals, authors and scientists – perhaps the only American actor to play such men, for since Hurt’s appearance in cinemas no one else has been sought.
William Hurt in Gorky Park:
William Hurt, born on March 20, 1950 in Washington DC, had his first role in a film late in life, but it was a spectacular one: in Ken Russell’s Trip From Hell (1980). The original title “Altered States” is like the motto for William Hurt’s play, except that in this film Ken Russell is all about psychedelic effects and not the subtle mental shifts and ramifications that Hurt displayed throughout his career. Even here he is a scientist whose social ties are endangered by his passion for his research.
Hurt was educated at the Juilliard School in New York City since 1973 under the tutelage of famed theater director John Houseman. That he was in the same class as Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve is always noted as anecdotal, because the three actors went on such different paths that they never crossed. In Off-Broadway plays, Hurt began to gain attention as a “sensitive, introverted young man.”
William Hurt in The Big Frustration:
After Altered States, Hurt was signed by Lawrence Kasdan for Body Heat. Kasdan had written the screenplay for the second Star Wars film and Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark – Body Heat was his first directorial effort, a homage to film noir, not exactly a commercial decision of the early ’80s -Years. The unlikely romance of Kathleen Turner and William Hurt makes all the more believable the charades Hurt indulges in in the tradition of the noir films of Otto Preminger and Billy Wilder: he fails because he cannot control his emotions cerebrally. And the lawyer Ned Racine also has that strange phlegm that is typical of the solipsists that Hurt played from then on.
In Michael Apted’s “Gorky Park” (1983) he is a Moscow policeman who becomes involved in a murder investigation and becomes a man of action. With his own mixture of short temper and stoicism, he defends a Russian woman and allies himself with an American police officer, he crawls in an old swimming pool and takes on the sinister sable dealer Lee Marvin. William Hurt’s characters just hate having someone tell them what to think. In Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill (1983), he is the misfit in a group of college friends who reunite for a weekend after the suicide of the even bigger misfit. Wounded in Vietnam, embittered as a radio host and now a quicksilver drug dealer with a sports car, Hurt is the most enigmatic character in the ensemble film. And he gets the girl.
The series of Oscar nominations began with “The Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1985). For his idiosyncratic performance in the complicated film (written by Leonard Schrader based on Manuel Puig’s novel), Hurt got the award right away, so to speak; he was nominated for the more obvious roles in God’s Forgotten Children (1986) and Broadcast News (1987). In Lawrence Kasdan’s The Accidental Tourist (based on the novel by Anne Tyler), he is a man locked in the grief of his son’s death, mechanically writing guidebooks for unhappy business travelers. A bit clichéd, he falls in love with the loud dog trainer Geena Davis, who also gets on his nerves. In “I Love To Her Death,” Hurt is just the sidekick of Kevin Kline, Lawrence Kasdan’s other favorite actor.
William Hurt starred in Woody Allen’s Alice (1990), a sentimental fairy tale for Mia Farrow, and then in Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World (1991), arguably rightly cast as the director’s alter ego. In Wayne Wang’s “Smoke” (1995), alongside Harvey Keitel, he is a writer confronted with the coincidences in life that he wanted to exclude. A break-in into his apartment is the collapse of his precarious order.
The main roles in Chantal Akerman’s “A Couch in New York” (1996) with Juliette Binoche and “Family Matter” (1998) were imperceptibly replaced by larger supporting roles, for example in “Michael” with John Travolta. Hurt starred in the miniseries Dune (2000) in Spielberg’s AI and M. Night Shyamalan’s mystery thriller The Village (2004). He is in his element in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2005) and was nominated for another Oscar (for a supporting role). Fellow actors Robert De Niro and Sean Penn signed Hurt for their films The Good Shepherd (2006) and Into The Wild (2008).
Although Hurt lamented the lack of major roles in film, which is why he returned to the theater, he found impressive smaller parts in series: in “Damages” (2009) with Glenn Close, in “Goliath” (2016) alongside Billy Bob Thornton as a shadowy figure with a disfigured face, most recently in “Condor” (2018). After improbably appearing in Louis Letterier’s The Incredible Hulk in 2008, Hurt played Secretary of State Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross in three “Avengers” films in an illustrious cast of famous actors. And once again showed the art of his encapsulated, in the end probably inconsolable renegades of existence.
William Hurt, the acting solitaire of his generation, died yesterday in Portland, Oregon, at the age of 71.
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