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In the zoo of monstrous egos that is
Hollywood, William Hurt took an al-
most Zen-like attitude to his profession.
“I am not an actor. I am nobody. I don’t
exist,” he insisted. “But the work exists.
The work is more than the actor.”
Never one to under-theorise, he lik-
ened his craft to the building of an ice-
berg. “You build what isn’t seen and
then just play the tip of it. That’s some-
times hard to do in American movies,
where the philosophy is to show the
whole berg,” he said.
It was an approach which in the 1980s
garnered him the rare phenomenon of
three consecutive nominations for the
Academy Award for best actor — in
1986 for Kiss of the Spider Woman, the
following year for Children of a Lesser
God and in 1988 for Broadcast News.
He won the Oscar for his bruising
portrayal of a fluttery, sensitive trans-
vestite incarcerated in a South Amer-
ican prison in Kiss of the Spider Woman.
It was a hard and well-earned prize.
While filming on location in Brazil he
was kidnapped and held hostage at
gunpoint before being released without
ransom. He also waived his salary so
that the film could be made within bud-
get. “There was no angling for gratui-
tous reward. This was just a glorious op-
portunity to do the right thing,” he said.
On the night he cut an oddly reluc-
tant winner. “I thought I was going to
put on my penguin suit and have a
couple of drinks and look at the other
salivating guys in the penguin suits like
you study a character,” he recalled.
“When they called my name out I really
thought, ‘Oh no, no, don’t put that tar-
get on my chest’.”
When Sally Field presented him with
his statuette he looked at her suspi-
ciously and asked “What the hell do I do
with this?”
“You live with it,” she told him.
A mesmerising presence on camera,
his “iceberg” theory enabled him to
inhabit his roles with an almost preter-
natural immersion, which he likened to
“walking through a mirror and it’s not
you any more”.
In Broadcast News he played a shal-
low self-absorbed television news an-
chor but as if by stealth brought a com-
pelling empathy to the role which as
one critic put it, conveyed “surprising
depths to his vapidity”.
Other 1980s box-office hits included
Body Heat, in which he played a lawyer
manipulated by Kathleen Turner’s
femme fatale into murdering her
wealthy husband; The Big Chill, in
which he excelled as an impotent,
stoned Vietnam vet; and Gorky Park, in
which he played an enigmatic Soviet
detective trying to solve a triple murder.
His patrician good looks and the phy-
sique of an athlete coupled with the way
he explored the sensitivity, compassion
and intelligence of his characters led to
him he becoming known as “the think-
ing person’s hunk”.
At 6ft 2in and with a dramatic cleft in
the chin and intense blue eyes, Hurt was
reckoned by The Hollywood Reporter to
have “picked up a mantle that had be-
longed to Robert Redford through the
previous decade, the all-American
blond Adonis who was neither jock nor
jerk”.
Hurt himself suggested he was “a
character actor in a leading man’s body”
New York’s Circle Repertory through-
out the 1980s and was nominated for a
Tony award for his role in the Broadway
production of Hurlyburly in the same
year that he was collecting an Oscar as
best actor for Kiss of the Spider Woman.
He disliked the Hollywood notion of
action heroes and preferred to concen-
trate on his characters’ inner lives.
“What’s wrong with heroism being a
man who has travelled two inches?” he
wondered gnomically. “Why is it that in
the movies we have to spend so much
time escaping rather than being freed
by accepting?”
Yet the stillness that became his
trademark on screen was somewhat in
contrast to a manic personality off. He
suffered from logorrhoea, which he
treated with lithium, and interviews
with him sometimes read like a script
from one of Dr Anthony Clare’s In the
Psychiatrist’s Chair programmes.
One interviewer reported that when
asked how shooting on his latest film
was going, he answered with “a thesis
on the interconnectedness of quantum
mechanics, Tibetan Buddhism, infect-
ed blood, the Gulf War, chaos theory
and Third World population growth”.
Another question prompted references
to William Blake and Spinoza. It wasn’tpomposity, simply the way that his
overactive mind worked.
Another interviewer compared a
typically unruly Hurt sentence to “a
balloon being folded into a matchbox”,
while his first wife noted with evident
frustration that “most people will just
eat a hamburger, he will want to know
where the cow was born”.
For a long period he was a heavy
drinker until he woke up one morning
in 1986 and had an epiphany. Conclud-
ing that it was a myth that “living life
on the edge is conducive to great act-
ing”, he decided to check into a Betty
Ford clinic.
His private life was also complicated.
He was married and divorced twice,
first to the actress Mary Beth Hurt
between 1971 and 1982 and then
between 1989 and 1993 to Heidi Hen-
derson, whom he met in rehab.
He also lived at different times with
Sandra Jennings, a dancer with the
New York City Ballet, Marlee Matlin
and the French actress Sandrine Bon-
naire, whom he met on a set in 1992.
After he had ended his relationship
with Jennings she sued to have their
common-law marriage legally recog-
nised and accused him in court of
violence, having religious hallucina-who brought a different “mask” to each
role he played. “The more complete
your mask, whether it’s in flagrante de-
licto or subtle, the more complete its
psychology, the more you see the soul
of your own being,” he philosophised.
His exacting approach gave him a
reputation for being difficult, although
his integrity meant that directors came
back for more. “Hurt promises you a
bad time and he delivers. How he made
me suffer,” said Héctor Babenco, the di-
rector of Kiss of the Spider Woman.
“Would I work with him again? Tomor-row.” Yet “the innate art” of acting, Hurt
believed, resided not in movies but in
live theatre. He was 30 when he landed
his first film role in Ken Russell’s Altered
States. By then he had appeared in 60
stage productions and had played what
David Mamet called the best Hamlet he
had ever seen. “If all the cinemas in the
world burnt down today, you’d still have
acting,” Hurt said.
He remained a company member ofFilming in Brazil he was
kidnapped at gunpoint
and held hostage
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tions and urinating on the sofa, among
other offences.
The hearing was followed daily on
television by millions and became one
of the most notorious “palimony” cases
in American legal history. Hurt won but
compared the experience to having his
skin steamed off in public.
Matlin in her 2009 autobiography I’ll
Scream Later also accused him of sub-
jecting her to physical abuse. He subse-
quently issued a public apology “for any
pain I caused”.
He is survived by four children, Alex
from his relationship with Jennings,
Samuel and William Hurt Jr from his
second marriage, and daughter Jeanne
Bonnaire-Hurt, who was born in 1994
after he had moved to Paris.
William McChord Hurt was born in
1950 in Washington DC, one of three
sons to Claire (née McGill), a sec-
retary at Time magazine, and Al-
fred Hurt, an official in the US
Agency for International Devel-
opment. His father’s job meant his
earliest years were spent peripatet-
ically in Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan
and Guam but his parents divorced
when he was six. Three years later
his mother married her boss,
Henry Luce III, the son of the
publishing magnate who founded
Time and Life magazines, and he
found himself living in a 22-room
apartment on New York’s Upper
East Side.
Educated expensively at the Mid-
dlesex School in Concord, Massa-
chusetts, Hurt took the lead in
school plays and on graduating in
1968 his school yearbook predicted
“you might even see him on Broad-
way”.
Instead, under the influence of his
strict Presbyterian stepfather, he
opted to study theology at Tufts Uni-
versity. He later dropped out and by
1972 had enrolled in the drama de-
partment at the Juilliard School,
where fellow students included Rob-
in Williams and Christopher Reeve.
Although his greatest success came
in the 1980s, he continued to work
steadily in supporting roles. Later suc-
cesses included his compelling portray-
al of a glowering mob boss in David
Cronenberg’s 2005 action thriller A
History of Violence. Despite being on
screen for less than ten minutes, it
earned him his fourth Oscar nomina-
tion as best supporting actor.
He also became familiar to a younger
generation of moviegoers as General
Thaddeus Ross in 2008’s The Incredible
Hulk. He reprised the role in four fur-
ther superhero movies.
Fame he saw as “a vacuum” which
brought him little pleasure. Instead his
enjoyment came from fly-fishing,
playing chess and flying his six-seater
private plane.
Asked what he might have done if he
hadn’t been an actor, he suggested that
“being in a monastery would be a good
way of life”. In some ways a life of mo-
nastic contemplation might have suited
him, but given his reputation for rest-
less intelligence and hyperactive curi-
osity, he was probably being ironic.William Hurt, actor, was born on March
20, 1950. He died of prostate cancer on
March 13, 2022, aged 71COLUMBIA/KOBAL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK; 20TH CENTURY FOX/KOBAL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCKOscar-winning Hollywood star who was as calm and mesmerising on screen as he was restless, intense and sometimes manic off it
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Hurt in 1983, and right with Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks in Broadcast News (1987). Gorky Park (1983) was also a hitBritish racing driver who
doubled for Steve McQueen
Vic Elford
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