by Nathaniel R
Hurt as I remember him.
I read with total shock yesterday the news that William Hurt had passed away of cancer. There's something about growing up watching famous actors that ties your own ideas about time to their legacy, however loosely. When I heard the news I thought "Noooo he was so young!" before realizing that he was just shy of his 72nd birthday and not the handsome entirely fictional thin-haired 40something actor that I realized I pictured him as, a slightly aged version of his smoldering but callow young beauty, perhaps informed by the wearier sinister bald character actor of his later years. But William Hurt was actually 71 when cancer took him. So why had William Hurt become frozen in time for me? The answer lies not just in my own cinephilia but in the very distinct phases of his career...
I dont recall when I first fell hard for William Hurt but I believe it was watching his Oscar win on TV since my years as a baby cinephile were very closely connected to discovering and becoming obsessed with movies through the Oscar ceremony since I wasn't allowed to see many of the R rated movies they'd honor. That's what the video store was for in the back half of the 1980s.
So if William Hurt was in fact already just about 72 than I am definitely not the baby cinephile who used to cut up magazines to make scrapbooks of my favourite stars. Yes, that sounds like a 1950s activity but kids were still doing it in the late 80s and early 1990s before the internet, I promise! In what was surely a tiny seed-like version of the Film Experience, I made a whole giant scrapbook called "Movies of the 1980s" with sections for each film year as well as sections for Favourite Actors and Favourite Actresses, ranked naturally; I imagine I was ranking even in the womb, perhaps numbering favourite tummy kicks or noises from the outside before I learned what "numbers" were.
His screen debut in the sci-fi body horror film Altered States (1980)
Naturally the actresses got more pages but William Hurt sat proudly near the top of the smaller Actor section, one of very few men to get a whole two page to himself. I forget who else did because even then I was an actressexual though Nick Davis and were still years away from meeting and coining the term. Sadly this time-capsule scrapbook (which would undoubtedly be hilarious to photograph and share) was lost to the ravages of the elements and time after sitting in my parents garage or moving between storage units or what not.
But back to William Hurt.
Hurt was born William McChord Hurt (how's that for a blueblood name?) and made a name for himself on the stage after graduating from Juillard, winning an Obie and a Theatre World Award in the 1970s in his twenties. It didn't take long for Hollywood to come calling. He made his film debut with a leading role in Ken Russell's trippy sci-fi drama Altered States (1980).
It's impossible to convey how sexy this screen pairing was. BODY HEAT (1981) has to be seen to be believed. Hurt and Turner would co-star again in The Accidental Tourist.
His fame and acclaim grew hand-in-hand and swiftly, too, following the release of the hit erotic noir Body Heart (1981) in which he and Kathleen Turner had the kind of enormously horny and naked sexual affair that is no longer to be found on movie theaters outside of a rare foreign art film here or there. In 1983 he had another much much bigger hit with the ensemble drama Big Chill (1983) starring a whos who of rising thirtysomething "prestige" actors (including Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, and Kevin Kline) . By the mid 1980s he was both a Tony nominated Actor (Hurlyburly, 1985) and one of Hollywood's A list leading men, scoring three consecutive Oscar nominations with Kiss of the Spider-Woman (1985, for which he won), Children of a Lesser God (1986), and Broadcast News (1987).
WILLIAM HURT'S FIVE BEST PICTURE NOMINATED FILMS
THE BIG CHILL (1983)
KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN (1985)
CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD (1986)
BROADCAST NEWS (1987)
THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST (1988)
Though he wasn't nominated a fourth consecutive time for The Accidental Tourist (1988), he probably came close since the quirky drama marked his fifth major role in a Best Picture nominee in a six year spread of time. It's surely lost on young Oscar nuts how exceptionally rare that kind of run is in in any frame of time prior to the expanded Best Picture era we've been living in for the past 14 years.
Marlee Matlin and William Hurt on Oscar night March 30th,1987. He reportedly berated her in the limo after her win with "what makes you think you deserved it?"
Curiously Hurt's leading man years seemed to end with the close of 80s as abruptly as they had begun at the start of the decade, marking him distinctly as a "1980s" star. I don't recall how or why his star fell -- anyone? -- so perhaps it was tied to his reportedly troubled personal life. In addition to reported drug use, he had a volatile romantic life divorcing the actress Mary Beth Hurt in the early 80s and going on to have children with three different women across the 80s and early 90s, including the great French actress Sandrine Bonnaire. In the mid 80s he famously had a volatile two year relationship with Marlee Matlin that she characterized in her 2009 memoir as being physically abusive including sexual assault. Hurt publicly apologized for any hurt he had caused in a statement immediately following the memoir's release.
At the Critics Choice Awards last night, Matlin was thoughtful and diplomatic telling a reporter from ET Canada:
“We’ve lost a really great actor and working with him on set in ‘Children of a Lesser God’ will always be something I remember very fondly. He taught me a great deal as an actor and he was one-of-a-kind.”
In the 1990s, during his fortysomething years, the films and roles were suddenly smaller, less mainstream, and markedly less successful, critically or otherwise. Perhaps this accounts for why he became so frozen in time in this cinephile's mind?
In a decade of minor films there was one hit, the now forgotten John Travolta fantasy Michael (1996) but in 1998 things began to change again with three films that were successful albeit in small ways. He was in the cast of Dark City which developed a minor cult following, he was paired with Meryl Streep and Renée Zellweger in One True Thing (though it was only Streep that got attention as per usual), and he played the dad in a would be franchise that didn't light the world on fire (Lost in Space) but was at least very high profile... something he hadn't had for most of the decade.
As Richie Cusack in A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (2005)
He made a critical comeback in the 2000s with a very buzzy small role as a dangerous mafia boss in A History of Violence (2005) which brought his fourth and final Oscar nomination. One of my early claim to fames as a pundit was predicting him despite no precursor attention beyond an NYFCC and LAFCA wins. He chased that honor with another well received film, Into the Wild (2007). In 2008, the very infancy of the MCU, he began to play General Thaddeus Ross starting with The Incredible Hulk. He would reprise that role in several more Marvel films (albeit in much smaller doses). Though he had reportedly signed for three new movies and a TV series before his death, his last film proved to be the poorly received Pierce Brosnan fantasy The King's Daughter (2022).
As general Thaddeus Ross in BLACK WIDOW (2021), his last appearance in the MCU
With one very happy exception (A History of Violence) his late performances never reached the thrilling heights of his first decade of film work. But it happens like that for some movie stars and there shouldn't be shame in that; short-lived greatness is still greatness. Being frozen in time has its advantages, including screen immortality since in the end even the greats leave us.
Our thoughts go out to Hurt's four kids in this difficult time but for those of us who only knew him from the movies, we'll always have his early classics, an incredible run of projects that would be the envy of many actors and that he rewarded with thoughtful creative actorly turns with a healthy does of movie-star magnetism thrown in.