William Hurt arguably had two well-connected, well-trod paths in front of him. He took neither. Hurt was born in Washington, D.C., to parents who were part of the U.S. diplomatic and media establishment: His father served in the diplomatic corps, and his mother worked for Time. (After his parents separated, his mother would marry Henry Luce III, the son of the founder and publisher of Time.) Rather than pursuing a career in diplomacy or journalism, where his familial connections in the fields would have likely assured him of a relatively easy path toward a stable career, Hurt chose acting. He studied drama at the Juilliard School of performing arts in New York and began his career as a stage actor with the New York’s Circle Repertory Company.
He chose wisely. When he died last week at age 71 in his Portland, Oregon, home, Hurt was widely recognized as one of the great film actors of his generation.
Early in his acting career, Hurt began to branch out to TV work and was discovered soon thereafter by Hollywood talent scouts. Hurt’s first big break came in 1978, when he was cast as the male lead in the science fiction film Altered States. Playing a psychopathologist studying the effects of mind-altering drugs and sensory deprivation chambers who experiences peculiar visions, the well-received movie would also become notable for featuring the screen debut of Drew Barrymore.
Hurt’s next movie would prove to be his best: the 1981 neo-noir Body Heat, directed by Star Wars and Indiana Jones screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan. In his directorial debut, Kasdan was able to unearth an underutilized dimension of Hurt’s talent, introducing him to American audiences as a multitalented everyman able to open a major studio movie as a genuine leading man. Hurt’s next great movie was The Big Chill (1983), a sentimental comedy also directed by Kasdan in which a group of yuppies gathers at the house of a friend following the funeral of a peer for a weekend of laughs, longings, and midlife ruminations. In The Big Chill, Hurt, playing a cynical Vietnam War veteran with a serious drug problem, proved himself the equal of his other budding star contemporaries, acting in a memorable ensemble that included Jeff Goldblum, Glenn Close, Kevin Kline, Tom Berenger, and Meg Tilly.
In 1985, Hurt embarked on an exceptional run of four first-rate performances in five years. Hurt won his sole Oscar that year for playing Luis Molina in Kiss of the Spider Woman, beating out a loaded best actor field that included Jack Nicholson, Jon Voight, and Harrison Ford. Hurt’s extravagant theatrical performance as a gay man living in a pre-sexually liberated society who has been imprisoned for his sexual crimes and who uses his prison time to concoct fantastical stories in his cell may not have been the best performance of his film career, but it is the type of performance that the academy tends to favor at awards time over the less showy and more modulated but just as substantial performances Hurt delivered in Body Heat and The Big Chill. Hurt returned to these types of performances in Children of a Lesser God (1986), in which he played a tutor for deaf students who falls in love with one of his pupils, and in The Accidental Tourist (1989), in which he reunited with Kasdan and Kathleen Turner to play a man who writes travel books for unadventurous travelers. Of this run of four great performances in five years, Hurt’s most audience-pleasing performance was his turn as the good-looking, if vapid, sportscaster Tom Grunick in Broadcast News (1987).
Hurt excelled at playing characters who were not particularly likable, with the exception of his completely villainous role in 2005’s A History of Violence, yet whom we end up sympathizing with anyway due to the humanity and the layers of complexity that his typically understated performances indicated were lurking beneath his characters’ crusty exteriors. Hurt, one of the more intelligent actors of his generation, also excelled at playing characters who were rather lacking in that department, most prominently in his roles as Grunick and as the ineffectual lawyer Ned Racine in Body Heat. The smart, mainstream, midbudget adult dramas that Hurt shone in sadly appear to be going the way of the horse and buggy. Hurt’s intelligent, broadly appealing performances, however, should only grow in their appeal as time moves on.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
