William Hurt: a magnetic, mischievous actor who invigorated Hollywood

Hollywood in the 1980s was energised and enhanced by the sly beauty, masculinity and sexuality of William Hurt, who managed three best actor Oscar nominations in a row in the middle of the decade: for Kiss of the Spider Woman in 1986, Children of a Lesser God in 1987 and Broadcast News in 1988. Having morphed from sleek leading man to character actor, he later got a fourth nomination for best supporting actor, for David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence.

Hurt won for the first of these, in which he played a gay man imprisoned for sexual offences in an oppressive South American state, sharing a cell with a gruffly straight political prisoner, and escaping into florid melodramatic fantasies. He was a sinuous and yet athletic screen presence as the exotic Luis, in his gowns and turban, exquisitely beautiful but with absolutely nothing delicate or elfin about him.

Hurt’s imposing features and subtly mischievous smile always had something of the Roman emperor about them. Perhaps if his looks had been a bit blander or more conventional he could have had Robert Redford’s career. It was perhaps something to do with his receding hairline, noticeable even at the very beginning of his career, in Ken Russell’s Altered States in 1980, where he played a psychologist who plunges down the rabbit hole of the mind into realms of modified consciousness and heightened experience.

Hurt was superb in darker roles, in which his handsomeness coexisted with something venal, cynical and vain. He was superb in Lawrence Kasdan’s neo-noir riff on Double Indemnity, Body Heat in 1981 in which he has a fatal desire for a married woman played by Kathleen Turner; she had a sulphurous chemistry with Hurt’s weak-minded lawyer, to go with the chemistry they both had with the camera.

The movies he made next were hugely important for establishing his star presence: Michael Apted’s thriller Gorky Park in 1983, scripted by Dennis Potter, cast Hurt as a Russian police officer who has to take on a gruesome case of murder. In 1986, he played James Leeds, the earnestly well-intentioned teacher of hearing-impaired children in Children of a Lesser God, who becomes fascinated by Sarah, a young deaf woman working at his school, played by hearing-impaired performer Marlee Martin, with whom Hurt was to have a relationship. Martin’s character rejects the idea of vocalising, instead of signing, an idea which Leeds is trying to foist on her. (This debate may have influenced the recent film Sound of Metal.) It was a perfectly solid performance from Hurt, though the film was a bit sonorous, platitudinous and insufferable for all that the character is supposed to be conceited and redeemed by his relationship with Sarah.

But his performing masterpiece was to come one year later, with James L Brooks’s glorious media satire Broadcast News, playing opposite two superb actors also giving the performance of their lives: Holly Hunter as Jane, the driven and emotionally tortured TV news producer and her best friend and colleague Aaron, a talented but insecure and prickly news reporter played by Albert Brooks. Hurt plays Tom, a blandly handsome and narcissistic former sports presenter who – to the horrified resentment of Aaron – gets promoted to chief anchorman. And to add to his woes, Jane (with whom brainy beta-male Aaron is pathetically and unrequitedly in love) is clearly very attracted to the shallow and sexy Tom, whose career advances as Aaron’s falters.

Hurt is superb as the guy who has an instinctive grasp of how to work the camera, how to read cues, how to invest everything with a specious air of charm and authority. To Aaron he seems like Satan himself. Tom begins the movie with much humility and self-doubt but gradually becomes entirely happy with his own massive prestige and even coaches Aaron in how to read the news when Aaron has to fill in for one evening – a job at which he is a humiliating failure – but Aaron catches Tom in the act of faking a tearful response in one of his interviews. Tom is essentially a comic creation but Hurt makes him complicated and vulnerable and human for all that he is clearly smug and objectionable.

The glowering gangster he played in Cronenberg’s A History of Violence amplified Hurt’s talent for a certain kind of male vanity. He was a loathsome assassin who is living a life of preposterous self-importance in a faintly bizarre pseudo-baronial stately home that he considers commensurate with a killer of his standing and when he confronts Viggo Mortensen’s small-town hero, he has that puzzled, quizzical look of distaste and disdain that he did so well. In his later roles, he could play elder-statesman figures with an opaque, forbidding mien (even in the Marvel movies) but it was in serio-comic roles that he really shone. Hurt was so sexy, funny and imposing.

• William Hurt

• comment