William Hurt’s laconic charisma and self-assured subtlety as an actor made him one of the leading men of the 1980s in films such as “Broadcast News”, “Body Heat” and “The Big Chill”. died. He was 71 years old.
Hurt’s son, Will, said in a statement that Hurt died of natural causes on Sunday. He said Hurt died peacefully, as a family. Deadline first reported Hurt’s death.
In a long career, Hurt was nominated four times for an Academy Award, winning “Kiss of the Spider Woman” in 1985. After his screen debut in the 1980s, Paddy Chayefsky wrote “Altered States “As a psychopathologist studying schizophrenia and experimenting with sensory deprivation, Hurt quickly emerged as a mainstay of the 1980s.
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In Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 neo noir “Body Heat,” Hurt starred opposite Kathleen Turner as a convicted murder lawyer. In 1983’s “The Big Chill,” again with Kasdan, Hurt played Vietnam War veteran Nick Carlton, one of a group of college classmates who gather for his friend’s funeral.
After starting in the New York theater, Hurt returned to the stage to star in Broadway’s “Hurlyburly” by David Rabe, for which he was nominated for a Tony. Shortly afterwards came “Spider Woman’s Kiss”, which won Hurt the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance as a gay prisoner in a repressive South American dictatorship.
In 1986’s “Children of a Lesser God,” it was her co-star Marlee Matlin who won an Oscar for her performance as a deaf guard at a school for the deaf. Hurt played a speech teacher. For Hurt and Matlin, his romance was also off-screen, but it was not Hurt’s first experience with his private life finding notoriety.
Jim Spellman
Hurt first married Mary Beth Hurt from 1971 to 1982. While he was married, he began a relationship with Sandra Jennings, whose pregnancy with his son precipitated Hurt’s divorce from Mary Beth Hurt. Six years later, a high-profile court case arose in which Jennings claimed to have been Hurt’s legal wife under South Carolina law and was therefore entitled to a portion of her income. A New York court ruled in Hurt’s favor, but the actor continued to maintain a strained relationship with fame.
“Acting is very intimate and private,” Hurt told The New York Times in 1983. “The art of acting requires as much solitude as the art of writing. Yes, you run into other people, but you have to. learning a craft, a technique, it’s a job. private person. “
In his 2009 memoirs, Matlin detailed physical abuse and drug abuse during their relationship. At that moment, Hurt apologized, saying, “My own memory is that we both apologized and we both did a lot to heal our lives.”
Albert Brooks, the co-star of Broadcast News, was among those who responded to Hurt’s death. “It’s very sad to hear this news,” Brooks wrote. “Working with him on Broadcast News was amazing. We’ll miss him so much.”
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