William Hurt and the Truth of Acting
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Beginning with his electric performance as a psychopathologist in search of the ultimate whatsit in Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980), William Hurt became one of the most captivatingly unclassifiable leading men in an all-too-often disparaged decade in cinema history. “However,” writes David Parkinson for the BFI, “Hurt detested the limelight and Hollywood in equal measure,” and from the 1990s on, we saw him—as Scout Tafoya puts it at RogerEbert.com—“settling into a role as a kind of curdled bohemian traveler.” After appearing in more than a hundred film and television productions and scoring four Oscar nominations and one win, Hurt had just completed voice work on the AMC animated series Pantheon when he passed away on Sunday, one week short of his seventy-second birthday.
Hurt’s father, a career diplomat, and his mother separated when he was six, and four years later, his mother married Henry Luce III, the son of the media magnate who founded Time, Life, and Fortune magazines. At the upscale Middlesex School, Hurt joined the dramatics club and took on several lead roles. He studied theology at Tufts, but after he graduated, he returned to acting, enrolling in the Juilliard School. In the late 1970s, he became a member of the Circle Repertory Company and began winning raves and awards for performances that ranged from Hamlet to a gay paraplegic Vietnam veteran in Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July.
At this early stage in his career, Hurt fielded—and turned down—dozens of movie offers. “This inbuilt reluctance made his film work, when it finally came, feel fascinatingly conflicted, as though he was regarding the medium itself with skepticism,” writes Ryan Gilbey in the Guardian. “You know I don’t make movies,” Hurt told producer Howard Gottfried, but as Alexander Larman tells it in the Telegraph, when Hurt realized that the screenplay Gottfried was handing him was written by Paddy Chayefsky (Marty, Network), he agreed to read it.
In Altered States, a story inspired by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Eddie Jessup, a professor at Columbia, experiments with isolation tanks and hallucinogenics in an attempt to unlock the true nature of consciousness. Reading the screenplay, “I was in a Cuban coffee shop and I couldn’t stop weeping for about half an hour,” Hurt later recalled. “I couldn’t stand up for forty-five minutes because it was every idea that I had been thinking about. Everything was in this thing.”
Director Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, Night Moves) and Chayefsky clashed, and Penn left the project. Ken Russell and Chayefsky clashed, too, but it was Chayefsky who ultimately pulled his name off Altered States, which Roger Ebert called “a superbly silly movie, a magnificent entertainment, and a clever and brilliant machine for making us feel awe, fear, and humor.”
In 1981, Peter Yates directed Hurt and Sigourney Weaver in Eyewitness, a serviceable thriller, but Hurt also worked with Lawrence Kasdan on the first of four films they would make together. Costarring Kathleen Turner, Body Heat sets Billy Wilder’s classic noir Double Indemnity (1944) in contemporary Florida. “Kasdan took advantage of the looser content restrictions of his era to make the subtext text, crafting pulse-quickening love scenes that take full advantage of Hurt and Turner’s explosive chemistry,” writes Jason Bailey in the New York Times.
Body Heat made Hurt a bankable star, and as David Rooney writes in the Hollywood Reporter, over the course of the decade, he “emerged as a golden specimen of patrician male beauty with the physique of an athlete—a matinee-idol appearance that he carried with the effortlessness of an unstructured blazer. Hurt picked up a mantle that had belonged to Robert Redford through the previous decade, the all-American blond Adonis who was neither jock nor jerk. Instead, he seemed almost indifferent to his good looks, more inclined to explore the sensitivity, compassion, and intelligence of his characters. In his prime, Hurt was both eye candy and empath.”
Hurt played a Russian officer working a murder case in Michael Apted’s Gorky Park, but 1983 also saw him as Nick Carlton, an impotent, drug-addicted Vietnam vet in Kasdan’s The Big Chill. A winning ensemble piece costarring Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Kline, Mary Kay Place, Meg Tilly, and JoBeth Williams, The Big Chill sees a cluster of boomers reuniting to mourn not only their friend who has killed himself but also the ideals they once swore by in the 1960s.
Hurt’s Nick is the bitter one, and Ty Burr looks back on a key scene in which Nick “interviews himself on a living room sofa, play-acting both an interlocutor and his squirming subject for a video camera. It’s a delicious bit, the character admitting his pain while tap-dancing around it in denial, and there’s a sneaking sense that Hurt is interrogating himself as an actor, holding his own feet to the fire to see what’s pretense and what’s truth.”
Hurt had “a special cerebral intensity,” writes Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, “and for all his overgrown-lost-boy beauty, his most memorable quality was probably his voice. It was always a notch higher than you expected, with a hint of a prickly whine that sounded, at times, like a hypnotist’s monotone. He had the fervor of someone who seemed to be holding his breath until he got to the end of a sentence.”
Playing Luis Molina, a movie-besotted gay man sharing a prison cell with a straight leftist revolutionary (Raul Julia) during Brazil’s military dictatorship in Héctor Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), Hurt scored his first Oscar nomination and his single win. For Gleiberman, Hurt was “almost spectacularly miscast,” and yet “what was miraculous about his performance is that Hurt used his steely, cerebral reticence—that mesmerizing monotone—to play Molina as a tranquil pleasure-seeker who ached for the life of freedom he couldn’t have.”
The following year, Hurt was nominated for another Oscar for his turn as James Reed, a teacher at a school for the hearing impaired, in Randa Haines’s Children of a Lesser God. Reed finds himself drawn to a young deaf woman, a janitor played by Marlee Matlin. Hurt was in his mid-thirties and Matlin was barely twenty when they moved in together. In her 2009 autobiography I’ll Scream Later, Matlin described Hurt as short-tempered and abusive. She recalled that on the night that he handed her the Oscar for best actress for her performance in Children of a Lesser God, he later asked her in the limousine, “What makes you think you deserved it, Marlee?” Asked to comment, Hurt said, “My own recollection is that we both apologized and both did a great deal to heal our lives.”
On screen, Hurt “could seem erudite, threatening, or suave,” writes Ryan Gilbey, “though he was at his most interesting playing men who were demonstrably less intelligent than he was.” Tom Grunick, the local news anchorman aiming for a bigger desk in James L. Brooks’s Broadcast News (1987), fits the bill. As Carrie Rickey wrote in 2011, “Tom’s charisma glosses over his intellectual deficits: on him, slowness looks like contemplation.”
Veteran reporter Aaron (Albert Brooks) thinks Tom, with his penchant for soft news and popular appeal, is the devil, and news producer Jane (Holly Hunter) would probably agree if she weren’t so attracted to him. “And—here’s the beauty part—when you give Hurt’s performance a really close reading,” writes Glenn Kenny at the Decider, “you see that he’s very subtly putting across something that’s not necessarily in the movie’s best interests as a romantic drama, a depth in his quiet moments that tells you: Wait. Maybe this guy really is the devil. It’s uncanny stuff.”
For the third year in a row, Hurt was nominated for a best actor Oscar, but he wouldn’t be nominated again until he turned in a riotously dark performance as a crime boss in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2005). By this point, Hurt was seeking out either smaller roles—a professor in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), for example, or an “elder” in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004)—or smaller films such as Wayne Wang’s Smoke (1995) or Chantal Akerman’s A Couch in New York (1996). He sought work outside of Hollywood in Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World (1991) and István Szabó’s Sunshine (1999), though he did return to play Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross in five Marvel movies.
Mostly, though, he returned to the theater as often as he could. As he told Jasper Rees at the Arts Desk in 2010, the theater “was my home. That’s where they did good work and that’s all I wanted to do. I was an actor happy to live with the truth of acting which is that as you do it, it’s gone.” As word of Hurt’s passing spread on Sunday, many of us returned to one of the best-told stories ever posted as a thread on Twitter.
In 2019, Sheila O’Malley looked back a number of years to an extraordinary night in Chicago, when she and her fellow members of “a very tight-knit company” of actors were performing Clifford Odets’s 1937 play Golden Boy. There will be no spoilers here—do read the thread—but what comes through, and what will live on in our memory of him, is Hurt’s deeply felt devotion to the art and craft of acting.
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