His son Alexander Hurt declared the demise in a statement but did not give a result in. Mr. Hurt revealed in 2018 that he had been identified with terminal prostate cancer.
A Washington native who appeared in more than 100 screen roles, Mr. Hurt built his movie debut in the 1980 psychedelic horror film “Altered States,” taking part in an obsessed scientist whose experiments with sensory deprivation direct him to convert into a primeval, apelike creature. The future yr, he shipped his breakout general performance in director Lawrence Kasdan’s neo-noir thriller “Body Heat,” as a South Florida attorney seduced by Kathleen Turner and roped into murdering her husband.
The motion picture was a sultry, shadow-filled throwback to 1940s movie noirs like “Double Indemnity.” And Mr. Damage — tall, blond and blue-eyed, with a square jaw and charmingly laconic monitor persona — was quickly in great demand. He reunited with Kasdan to participate in a cynical, drug-addicted Vietnam War veteran in “The Large Chill” (1983), and received 3 consecutive Academy Award nominations for finest actor, together with as an idealistic trainer of the deaf in “Children of a Lesser God” (1986) and a handsome but ethically compromised newscaster in “Broadcast News” (1987).
“His talent is to rely on that significantly less is much more,” Kasdan informed movie critic Roger Ebert after directing Mr. Hurt in a third movie, “The Accidental Tourist” (1988). “I really do not believe anyone does that much better in American acting. It’s to have faith in that the camera sees anything if you are emotion it and if you’re real — and Monthly bill is accurate.”
Mr. Harm gained the Oscar for “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1985), a drama tailored from Manuel Puig’s novel of the same identify. His functionality, as a homosexual window dresser who trades stories with his prison cellmate (Raul Julia), secured his popularity for enjoying multilayered figures with a seemingly easy charisma. Ebert wrote that Mr. Harm “creates a character utterly unlike any individual else he has at any time performed — a frankly theatrical character, exaggerated and mannered — and however he never looks to be reaching for effects.”
In advance of entering flicks, Mr. Damage crafted an extensive portfolio of theater roles, culminating in his Tony-nominated performance in David Rabe’s dim comedy “Hurlyburly,” which was directed by Mike Nichols and opened on Broadway in 1984. He explained himself early on as a character actor trapped “in a foremost man’s system,” and tended toward supporting roles later in his occupation, such as in Steven Spielberg’s “A.I. Synthetic Intelligence” (2001), M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Village” (2004), Stephen Gaghan’s “Syriana” (2005) and David Cronenberg’s motion thriller “A Heritage of Violence” (2005), which acquired him his fourth Oscar nomination, this time for best supporting actor.
Mr. Hurt was in some methods an not likely movie star. Cerebral and rigorous, balding by his mid-30s, he analyzed theology in faculty and continued to dwell on the East Coast even immediately after he commenced producing films. By some accounts, he could be hard to operate with he reportedly struggled with alcohol and drug abuse, and his former girlfriend Marlee Matlin, who won an Oscar starring opposite him in “Children of a Lesser God,” claimed in a 2009 memoir that he bodily and emotionally abused her all through their romantic relationship in the 1980s. “My very own recollection is that we equally apologized and each did a terrific deal to mend our life,” Mr. Hurt claimed in a statement at the time.
He not often spoke about his private daily life in interviews, preferring as a substitute to produce impassioned monologues about consumerism, the marriage in between church and state, the science of condensation or the “homogenized disruptive entities” that created performing hard.
“Elliptical? Philosophical? I can be that way,” he informed the New York Instances in 1994, just before turning to the meaning of existence. “There’s anxiety or faith. If you are living by fear, then you’re usually seeking for security. If you are living by religion, then you are often hunting for freedom.” He added that when it arrived to accomplishing a religion-stuffed existence, “You just preserve at it. Defeating panic is not a light-weight swap. For most of us, it’s day-to-day operate.”
William McChord Hurt was born in Washington on March 20, 1950. His father worked on U.S. international assistance applications and was posted to Guam, where by Mr. Harm invested his early decades ahead of his dad and mom divorced. He was 10 when his mom, who worked on small business operations at Time Inc., married Henry Luce III, a son of the media company’s co-founder.
Mr. Damage attended Middlesex prep college in Massachusetts and Tufts College exterior Boston, exactly where he researched theology and then drama — “the next rung down on the ladder of ego,” as he set it — and obtained a bachelor’s degree in 1972. He enrolled in the acting system at the Juilliard College in Manhattan but chafed at the school’s strict disciplinary requirements, leaving in 1975 to embark on a cross-state highway journey.
His travels took him to Ashland, Ore., exactly where he had his breakthrough as an actor while showing up in a community production of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Evening.” “I experienced worked for a long time in total darkness, complete question, finish confusion,” he later on advised New York magazine. “And then, a single working day, I walked out onstage and understood I experienced some craft. It was just there — and it felt so very good.”
Returning to New York, he appeared in off-Broadway performs with the Circle Repertory Corporation, profitable an Obie Award in 1977 for “My Life” and starring in the authentic creation of Lanford Wilson’s “Fifth of July.” He regarded as Hollywood a “cultural wasteland,” but signed on to “Altered States” right after looking through the script, by acclaimed screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky five days right after filming ended, he returned to New York to star in a Circle Rep creation of “Hamlet.”
Mr. Harm was later on showcased in the films “Eyewitness” (1981), as a janitor who teams with a Tv set news reporter (Sigourney Weaver) to remedy a murder, and “Gorky Park” (1983), based on a secret novel by Martin Cruz Smith about a Soviet detective. By the 1990s, he was showing in extra offbeat, impartial movies, declining a role in “Jurassic Park” to surface in flicks like Wim Wenders’s “Until the Finish of the World” (1991) and Wayne Wang’s “Smoke” (1995).
He ongoing to function with significant administrators, showing in Woody Allen’s “Alice” (1990), Nora Ephron’s “Michael” (1996) and Franco Zeffirelli’s “Jane Eyre” (1996), though also joining massive-spending budget initiatives these as “Lost in Space” (1998), a extensively panned adaptation of the 1960s science-fiction sequence. Beginning with “The Incredible Hulk” (2008), he appeared in many Marvel movies as Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, an Army normal who becomes secretary of point out.
Mr. Damage also worked on television, appearing in the lawful drama “Goliath” and earning Emmy Award nominations in 2009, for his visitor position in the drama sequence “Damages,” and in 2011, for starring as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in the Television movie “Too Large to Are unsuccessful,” about the 2008 economic disaster.
His marriages to actress Mary Beth Harm and Heidi Henderson ended in divorce. He also experienced a connection in the 1980s with Sandra Jennings, who unsuccessfully claimed in court that she experienced been Mr. Hurt’s prevalent-legislation wife and was entitled to a share of his earnings.
Mr. Hurt had four small children, which include a son, Alexander, from his partnership with Jennings two sons, Samuel and William Jr., from his next relationship and a daughter, Jeanne Bonnaire-Hurt, from a romance with French actress and filmmaker Sandrine Bonnaire. Data on survivors was not immediately accessible.
Whilst Mr. Harm delighted in chatting about acting, he explained he experienced very little curiosity in the movie star position that accompanied his good results. Interviewed by the Periods in 1989, he recalled that he when experimented with to escape out of a restaurant’s back doorway following realizing a photographer was waiting around to snap his picture exterior the main exit. The operator declined his ask for, saying, “You needed to be the celeb. You wished this.”
“And I instructed him, ‘You do not know what I desired. How dare you inform me what I required? Which is not what I wished.’ What I needed to do was a thing very generous. And I nevertheless want that, and I get good joy out of it,” he claimed. “Because it’s something I can share. It is my window. It is what I appear at elegance by means of.”
