NEW YORK (AP) — William Hurt, whose laconic charisma and self-assured subtlety as an actor made him one of the 1980s foremost leading men in movies such as “Broadcast News" and “The Big Chill,” has died. He was 71.
Hurt's son, Will, said in a statement that Hurt died Sunday of natural causes. Hurt died peacefully, among family, his son said. The Hollywood Reporter said he died at his home in Portland, Oregon. Deadline first reported Hurt’s death. Hurt was previously diagnosed with prostate cancer that had spread to the bone in 2018.
In a long-running career, Hurt was four times nominated for an Academy Award, winning for 1985's “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” After his breakthrough in 1980’s Paddy Chayefsky-scripted “Altered States” as a psychopathologist studying schizophrenia and experimenting with sensory deprivation, Hurt quickly emerged as a mainstay of the '80s.
In 1983’s “The Big Chill,” again with Kasdan, Hurt played the brooding Vietnam War veteran Nick Carlton, one of a group of college pals who gather for their friend’s funeral.
Hurt, whose father worked for the State Department, was born in Washington D.C. and traveled widely as a child while attending boarding school in Massachusetts. His parents divorced when he was young. When Hurt was 10, his mother married Henry Luce III, son of the Time magazine founder. Hurt studied acting at Julliard and first emerged on the New York stage with the Circle Repertory Company. After “The Big Chill,” he returned to the stage to star on Broadway in David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly,” for which he was nominated for a Tony.
Among Hurt's greatest performances was James L. Brooks' 1987 comedy “Broadcast News,” as a slick but lightweight anchorman who symbolized the emerging fusion of entertainment and journalism.
Albert Brooks, Hurt’s “Broadcast News” co-star, was among the many who responded to Hurt’s passing Sunday. “So sad to hear this news,” wrote Brooks on Twitter. “Working with him on ‘Broadcast News’ was amazing. He will be greatly missed.”
After his torrid ‘80s run, Hurt fell increasingly out of favor with filmmakers in the '90s, and some reasoned that it was because of his reputation. Hurt, however, continued to defend his approach, telling The Los Angeles Times in 1994 that “I give more by solving the truth than by pandering to expectations and facile hopes.”
"If a director tells me to make the audience think or feel a certain thing, I am instantaneously in revolt,” Hurt said. “I’m not there to make anyone else think or feel anything specific. I have agreed to something the whole piece says. Beyond that it is my only obligation to solve the truth of the piece. I don’t owe anybody anything — including the director.”
Nevertheless, Hurt never slowed down, piling up credits in the ‘90s and ’00s — Woody Allen's “Alice,” Wayne Wong's “Smoke,” Nora Ephron's “Michael,” Franco Zeffirelli's “Jane Eyre.”
Hurt, always a intelligent screen presence, gradually morphed into a character actor.
Hurt continued to work constantly in the years leading up to his death: 10 episodes of “Damages"; a string of Marvel films, including “Avengers: Endgame" and “Black Widow,” as the military officer Thaddeus Ross; 14 episodes on Amazon's “Goliath.”
Often, Hurt suggested that his fabled run in the '80s was the outlier to what defined him as an actor.
“Success is isolating,” he told The Telegraph in 2004. “Certainly the Oscar was isolating. In some ways, it was antithetical to what I was aiming at. I didn’t want to be isolated. I didn’t want some big target on my chest saying: ‘He’s an Oscar-winner, he’s the one to be.’ I wanted to be an actor, so I was very confused about it. Sometimes I’m still confused about it.”