WILLIAM HURT
(20 March 1950 – 3 March 2022)
The American actor William Hurt, who has died from terminal prostate cancer at the age of 71, always seemed to have something on his mind. In a film it may have been just the script, but apparently in real life he had a constant air of being on a cloud of thought. Although garrulous in the extreme, he was perhaps a difficult subject to interview for, if he took over the conversation and started going off on a tangent into his own realms of rhetoric, he was thereby not giving the interviewer what the latter was hoping to get out of the encounter. However, he was maybe not your average actor but was certainly successful in the career route he chose to take.
William McChord Hurt was born in Washington D.C. to Alfred McChord Hurt, who worked for the US State Department, and his wife Claire Isabel McGill, who worked for Time Inc. He attended the Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, and then Tufts University in Massachusetts in order to study theology but left and joined the Juilliard School in New York to major in acting. After leaving college in 1976, he began to get stage work and joined the Circle Repertory Company in New York City, where he won an Obie off-Broadway award for his first appearance in My Life, a play by Corinne Jacker. He had further successes with the company including playing Hamlet and continued to appear on stage in off-Broadway productions including Henry V, Richard II and A Midsummer Night's Dream, as well as Uncle Vanya and he received a Tony nomination for David Rabe's Hurlyburly in 1984.
Hurt's debut on film was Ken Russell's Altered States, based on a 1980 sci-fi screenplay about sensory deprivation by Paddy Chayefsky, although the author disowned it following disagreements with the director. Nevertheless, it won Hurt a Golden Globe. The following year saw him in Peter Yates' thriller Eyewitness, with Sigourney Weaver, and in Lawrence Kasdan’s erotic drama Body Heat, with Kathleen Turner in her film debut. After that Hurt was in demand for some fairly high-profile movies – The Big Chill, The Accidental Tourist, Gorky Park and Kiss of the Spiderwoman, in the last of which he played a gay man in prison for raping an underage boy. His performance won him his only Oscar plus a Bafta and a London Film Critics' Circle award in 1985, although he was subsequently Oscar-nominated for Children of a Lesser God, with the deaf actress Marlee Matlin, and Broadcast News, James L. Brooks' dramedy about life in a TV news office.
Later on Hurt worked with directors including Kasdan again, Woody Allen, Wim Wenders, Anthony Minghella, Chris Menges, Wayne Wang, Chantal Akerman, Nora Ephron, Roger Michell and M. Night Shyamalan, so he was highly considered as an actor by his directors. Franco Zeffirelli cast him as Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre (1996), Istvan Szabo directed him in Sunshine, and Steven Spielberg used him for A.I. Artificial Intelligence. He was in another sci-fi epic, Lost in Space, and in 2005 received many international plaudits including a best supporting actor nomination for his role in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence. Among his later films were Stephen Gaghan's Syriana, Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd, Sean Penn's Into the Wild, Louis Leterrier's The Incredible Hulk, Julie Delpy's The Countess, Ridley Scott's Robin Hood, Ned Benson's The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, and Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame as Thaddeus Ross.
Over the years Hurt had appeared on television in Kojak, Dune, Frankenstein, Damages, Moby Dick (as Captain Ahab), Bonnie and Clyde, Beowulf and Condor among other programmes. At present Pantheon is still filming for TV and three other feature films are in the pipeline. Hurt also regularly recorded radio book adaptations including The Accidental Tourist and The Shipping News.
William Hurt was married to the actress Mary Beth Hurt from 1971 to 1982. He married Skitch Henderson's daughter Heidi in 1989. They had two sons, William and Sam, and divorced in 1993. He also lived with Sandra Jennings in the 1980s and with her fathered their son Alex. A relationship with the French actress Sandrine Bonnaire produced their daughter Jeanne Bonnaire-Hurt. He also had a relationship with Marlee Matlin but it foundered after occurrences of drug and physical abuse became public knowledge.
MICHAEL DARVELL