He was one of Hollywood’s great character actors and an icon of the 1980s: On the Death of William Hurt.
William Hurt probably wouldn’t have gotten the role that brought him an Oscar and the Best Actor Award in Cannes today. In “The Spider Woman’s Kiss” he played a young man who has been locked up in a Latin American prison for being gay. While heterosexual actors were praised for the art of adaptation at the time, such occupations are controversial today. For William Hurt, however, acting remained just that: the art of embodying everything that doesn’t already shimmer on one’s own surface.
As one of the best-looking men in ’80s American film, he could have picked even the well-paying starring roles, but that would undoubtedly have bored him. As he explained in a conversation with the critic Roger Ebert in 1988, he was interested in literally climbing the summit: “Acting means building the tip of the iceberg. You have to build up what nobody sees and then play the lead. You can only see a tiny bit of the iceberg, but it’s massive. It’s difficult in American cinema, where the philosophy is to show the whole iceberg. We’re not used to passive heroes.”
Only towards the end of his career did he also allow himself a good piece of the cake of those wonderful batch roles that the Marvel Universe bestows on deserving character actors. Since “The Incredible Hulk” he has been seen four more times as General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross. But even with a view to the easier roles, his reputation for preparing meticulously preceded him. As Russell Crowe, who directed him as William Marshal in ‘Robin Hood,’ tweeted: “With ‘Robin Hood,’ I knew he was known for asking character questions, so I had a dossier on the life of William Marshal compiled. He came to see me when he got to the location. I handed him the stack. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a bigger smile.”
The winning, but often mischievous smile that Hurt showed on screen was perhaps best worn in “Nachrichtenfieber – Broadcast News”: Rarely has news journalism as part of modern ratings television been told in a more bitter and yet entrancing way. Hurt is the embodiment of smartness alongside an ambitious but hapless reporter played by Albert Brooks. How cleverly did he and director James L. Brooks see through this ability for success-spoilt smoothness, which was so highly valued in the yuppie era.
It was his third consecutive Oscar nomination, following The Kiss of the Spider Woman and his role as a teacher at a deaf school in God’s Forgotten Children – and how different these three roles are from one another.
William Hurt had a classic, almost old-fashioned masculinity that he used like a blank canvas. Preferably for smaller art house and independent films, which benefited enormously from his talent and his fame: “Gorky Park”, “The Travels of Mr. Leary” or “Smoke” were among them, as was Wim Wenders’ “Bis to the End of the World”, Chantal Akerman’s “A Couch in New York” and especially David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence”: With his dazzling gangster character he once again received an Oscar nomination.
William Hurt’s filmography documents a restless career that surpassed a high bar before it even began: only three applicants in his year’s class made it to New York’s Juilliard School.
The school was then still run by John Houseman, one of the fathers of modern American theater – the other two then accepted were Christopher Reeve and Robin Williams.
Hurt continued to be loyal to the theater, particularly in Shakespearean plays. His filmography ultimately included more than 80 feature films and numerous television productions. Like only a few actors, he was something like a guarantee of quality: predictable in his demands, unpredictable in his range. With several unfinished projects to go, he succumbed to prostate cancer on Sunday at the age of 71.
