There Was Something About William Hurt — Something Unnerving, Volatile, and Revelatory

There was always something unnerving about William Hurt onscreen. The actor, who died today at age 71, just a week short of his 72nd birthday, had the good looks of a matinee idol at the start of his film career. Producer Alan Ladd, Jr. once praised his performing versatility before adding, “But of course he’s a lead actor”. And Hurt himself once said he was “a character actor trapped in a leading man’s body.” In his best performances Hurt added, in subtle doses, a volatility that threw the viewer off balance. Always in surprising, ultimately revelatory ways.

He was born in D.C., raised in New York, and he trained at Julliard, where he knew Christopher Reeve and Robin Williams. A member of New York’s Circle Repertory Theater between 1977 and 1989, he was deeply devoted to the stage for some time. His first major movie role took conspicuous advantage of his qualities as a screen unknown. It was in Altered States, an intense adventure of self-discovery through psychotropic drugs and anthropology and other, more overt sci-fi means. Hurt played Eddie Jessup, a psychopathologist whose research into schizophrenia leads to experiments with mushrooms, sensory deprivation, and more. Adapted from a novel by Paddy Chayefsky (who also wrote the script but took his name off the credits after balking at director Ken Russell’s handling of the material), the movie is furiously compulsive, as is Hurt’s pained, searching performance. 

Not too much later Hurt was gracing the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, talking about his own experiences with hallucinogens, and joking about how he was all the actors whose name sounded like his — John Heard! John Hurt! — rolled into one. He was riding high, career-wise, on two lead roles, one as an everyman besotted with television crime reporter Sigourney Weaver in Eyewitness, and the other as a mildly sleazy lawyer besotted with what you might call an Uberfemme Fatale in Body Heat, the Lawrence Kasdan riff on Double Indemnity that, among other things, set a new standard for onscreen eroticism in Hollywood studio pictures. 

Hurt’s Ned Racine in that picture sure is dumb — a lot dumber than Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff in Indemnity, and he wasn’t exactly a genius — but looking at Kathleen Turner it’s easy to see how he got that way. Nevertheless, in this performance Hurt starts working the peculiar magic that only he possessed at the time. In scenes where he interrogates a former client (played by young Mickey Rourke, who leaps off the screen) about how to do some crimes, his way of listening, of processing, suggests a guy who’s not necessarily an idiot. Rather, he’s someone who gets what’s he’s signed up for, and is past caring about its morality or whether it’ll “end” well. A guy who, on the highway to hell, can only think to rev his vehicle up to 120. 

In Hurt’s subsequent two films with writer/director Kasdan, he played it a bit more straightforward. Both were pictures about grief and loss. In 1983 The Big Chill he was the cynical realist of the ensemble cast, gathered for the funeral of a friend who committed suicide. He lays into both his former comrades and their lost counterculture idealism with a vengeance, until young waif Meg Tilly finds a way inside and makes him confront his own despair. It’s pretty pat stuff in my estimation but Hurt gives it real life. 1988’s The Accidental Tourist is stronger — Kasdan here adapts Anne Tyler’s novel, and keeps faith with it, and the material is just better. Playing a withdrawn man whose marriage is torn asunder by, among other things, the death of a child, he gives one of the best portrayals of an emotionally shut-down person ever committed to film.

He showed a great performer’s integrity in his portrayal of Luis Molina in 1985’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, the film for which he won his sole Oscar (he was a nominee three times). Here he played a Latin-American man imprisoned as a sex offender; much of the movie focuses on his relationship with his cellmate, a revolutionary played by Raul Julia. Molina often rhapsodizes about a (nonexistent) film, a lurid melodrama/Nazi propaganda piece. Manuel Puig, whose novel screenwriter Leonard Schrader adapted, did not shy away from the problematic, that’s for sure. In crafting his portrayal, Hurt doesn’t attempt any kind of Hispanic accent; he doesn’t take Molina’s effeminacy into camp territory; he just does the honest, solid job of playing a ruined, doomed human being. (And Hurt did not in any way congratulate himself for playing gay in the publicity for the movie.) 

From the mid-’80s on he seemed to go from strength to strength. He played a passionate teacher to deaf Marlee Matlin in 1986’s Children of a Lesser God, the kind of drama that critics used to call “searing;” the work here lived up to the descriptive. In 1987’s Broadcast News he pulled another coup. As the friendly, amiably venal careerist future anchor Tom Grunick, who inspires the film’s memorable speech about how seductive the devil is, Hurt is often like an enthusiastic Labrador. The scene where he’s going on to Holly Hunter’s Jane Craig about how their reporting interaction is like “great sex” makes him a pretty horny Labrador, too. In order for the film to properly function as a romantic comedy, you have to at least kind of like Tom, and Hurt’s rolling out of all the leading man charm does indeed make you like him. But, as seen in the bit where Grunick makes himself conjure up a tear, the venality is there. And — here’s the beauty part — when you give Hurt’s performance a really close reading, 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. 

During this run, Hurt led a tumultuous and often destructive personal life. He lived with Matlin for a spell in the ‘80s, and her later recollections of the time together featured instances of abuse, fueled by drugs and alcohol. While he did not make a habit of discussing at length his marriages and affairs, he did, later in life, speak of taking on his addictions. And in 2020, Matlin, then celebrating 30 years sober, recounted that Hurt had actually encouraged her to confront her own problem. 

Through it all, he continued to do the work, eventually becoming the character actor he always felt he was. One of his last great lead roles was in Wim Wenders’ 1991 epic Until the End of the World, playing a globe-trotting photographer trying to outrun the title event, not to create a journalistic record, but to bear witness for his dying mother. He earned his final Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in David Cronenberg’s mordantly hilarious 2006 A History of Violence, playing a deliberately cartoonish but nonetheless terrifying mob boss. I met the man once, in 2008, at Sundance, where he was promoting The Yellow Handkerchief. He had no superstar airs about him as he entered the chilly restaurant that was serving as a photo studio for Premiere, where I was working at the time. Just a gigging actor doing the job that a gigging actor is sometimes obliged to do. 

In a video interview about Lee Marvin, with whom Hurt worked in 1983’s Gorky Park, Hurt retells an anecdote Marvin shared with him. It’s a great anecdote and you’ll want to hear if from Hurt, but it’s what Hurt says prior to that which got a hook in me. Hurt imitates Marvin asking “You wanna know what life is all about?” And then Hurt recounts his own reaction, moving his head back, startled: “Well yeah!” Hurt laughs. “That’s…that’s what I’m doing here! That’s why I do what I do. To keep pursuing that question.” Here’s hoping he found satisfactory answers. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.