Critic’s Appreciation: William Hurt, Dreamboat With a Soul
For many of us who had really begun to savor the rewards of grown-up movies by the early 1980s, the loss of William Hurt, who died today at 71, cuts deep. And no, I’m not going to say it hurts.
Beginning with Ken Russell’s Altered States at the start of the decade and continuing through such era-defining films as Lawrence Kasdan’s first two features, Body Heat and The Big Chill, Hurt emerged as a golden specimen of patrician male beauty with the physique of an athlete — a matinee-idol appearance that he carried with the effortlessness of an unstructured blazer.
More from The Hollywood Reporter
Hurt picked up a mantle that had belonged to Robert Redford through the previous decade, the all-American blond Adonis who was neither jock nor jerk. Instead, he seemed almost indifferent to his good looks, more inclined to explore the sensitivity, compassion and intelligence of his characters. In his prime, Hurt was both eye candy and empath.
Even when playing dumb, as the handsomely telegenic, unapologetically shallow news anchor in Broadcast News, Hurt humanized the role with stealth warmth and emotional availability. The part of Tom Grunick seemed a descendant of affable buffoon Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but James L. Brooks’ nuanced writing and Hurt’s performance gave surprising depths to his vapidity. He became a worthy third point in the romantic triangle with brainy co-workers played by Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks.
That screen persona of the thinking person’s hunk has few equals today in an age when most male movie stars tend to be brooding superheroes, Energizer gym bunnies or overgrown boys. Perhaps Brad Pitt and Chris Pine come closest — at least in terms of that particular traditional apple-pie American type that dates back to Tab Hunter and Troy Donahue. The difference was that Redford and then Hurt made the model smarter.
Hurt’s star rose in the transitional period when the character-driven, gritty realism of the New Hollywood ‘70s was making way for the high-gloss, high-concept plasticity of corporate moviemaking that took over in the ‘80s. His films in those 10 years became mainstream hits despite a maturity that was falling out of fashion.
He continued working reasonably steadily through more recent decades, occasionally registering strongly in films like Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, as the affluent father bewildered by the choice of his disillusioned son (played by Emile Hirsch), to go off the grid; or David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, as a Philadelphia crime boss, with a grudge against his brother (Viggo Mortensen), who has endeavored to put his past as a professional hitman behind him.
More often, however, Hurt has been relegated to playing merely functional technocrat roles, like Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross in a string of MCU movies.
It’s for his 1980s movies that Hurt will be remembered. Right off the bat, as a Columbia University psychopathologist studying schizophrenia in Altered States, scripted by Paddy Chayefsky, Hurt was an indelible presence, a science nerd who made sensory deprivation both cerebral and sexy.
He followed with the generic thriller Eyewitness, directed by Peter Yates and written by Steve Tesich, in which someone had the dumb idea to cast Hurt as a New York City office building janitor — come on now! — romantically interested in Sigourney Weaver’s TV news reporter.
But Hurt’s career picked up steam with 1981’s neo-noir, Body Heat. He played a two-bit South Florida lawyer manipulated — and who could blame him? — by Kathleen Turner’s femme fatale into murdering her wealthy husband. Many actors might have been shoved into the margins by Turner’s sizzling siren in Kasdan’s Double Indemnity riff, but Hurt made his beguiled puppet of a character — quite literally led by his penis — into a flesh-and-blood man, weak though not spineless.
Hurt did a complete 180 when he reunited with Kasdan two years later on The Big Chill, playing an impotent, permanently stoned Vietnam vet in that drama about the reunion of former college friends for a funeral. He again worked with Kasdan on 1988’s The Accidental Tourist, adapted from Anne Tyler’s novel about a buttoned-up Baltimore travel guide writer, shaken out of his inertia by Geena Davis’ free spirit, a role that won her a supporting actress Oscar.
Hurt’s best actor Oscar win was for 1985’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, Héctor Babenco’s film of the Manuel Puig novel. In that bruising character study pitting self-delusion against political idealism, Hurt and Raúl Juliá played reluctant cellmates in a Brazilian prison, the former a gay fantasist, the latter a hardline leftist revolutionary.
While the film is alluring melodrama and carries the Academy stamp of prestige, to me it’s far from the most interesting of Hurt’s roles. It was significant in terms of LGBTQ screen representation, but I’m not the only queer critic to be irked by the cliché of a tragic gay man disconnected from reality. The famously outspoken Puig was mischievously quoted saying: “La Hurt is so bad she will probably win an Oscar.” Ouch.
No less conventionally Oscar-baity was Hurt’s big awards contender the following year, Children of a Lesser God, in which he played an earnestly impassioned hearing speech teacher at a school for the deaf in a conflicted romantic relationship with a deaf custodian, a role that won Marlee Matlin an Academy Award for best actress.
I caught Hurt on my first visit to New York in 1984 in one of his rare returns to his stage roots, as part of the killer ensemble of Mike Nichols’ production of Hurlyburly. The David Rabe play about Hollywood fringe-dwellers also starred Christopher Walken, Harvey Keitel, Sigourney Weaver, Jerry Stiller, Judith Ivey and a teenage Cynthia Nixon. Its acidic misogyny made the drama an assaulting experience, but watching those gifted young actors pinging off one another and Rabe’s sinewy dialogue was its own reward.
Still, I prefer to remember Hurt as a star whose magnetism was born for the big screen — a dreamboat with a soul, driven by a restless intelligence.
Best of The Hollywood Reporter
Solve the daily Crossword
