NEW YORK - William Hurt, whose brief charisma and confident subtlety as an actor made him one of the leading men of the 1980s in films such as Broadcast News, Body Heat and The Big Chill, has died. He was 71 years old.
Hart's son Will said in a statement that Hart died of natural causes on Sunday. Among the family, his son said that the injury died peacefully. 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 bone in 2018.
In a career that spanned a long time, Hurt was nominated for an Academy Award four times, winning for 1985's Kiss of the Spider Woman. Following his success in the 1980s as a psychopathologist in the Paddy Shafsky-scripted Altered States, studying schizophrenia and experimenting with sensory deprivation, Hurt quickly emerged as a mainstay of the '80s.
In Lawrence Kasdan's 1981 steamy neo noir Body Heat, Hurt starred alongside Kathleen Turner as a lawyer who was implicated in the murder. In 1983's The Big Chill, again with Kasdan, Hurt played Vietnam War veteran Nick Carlton, one of a group of college friends 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 got divorced when he was young. When Hurt was 10 years old, his mother married Henry Luce III, the son of the founder of Time magazine. Hurt studied acting at Juilliard and first appeared on the New York stage with the Circle Repertory Company. After The Big Chill, he returned to the stage to star in David Rabe's Harleyburly on Broadway, for which he was nominated for a Tony.
Shortly after came Kiss of the Spider-Woman, which won Hurt a Best Actor Oscar for his performance as a gay prisoner in the oppressive South American dictatorship.
"I'm very proud to be an actor," said Hurt as he accepted the award.
In 1986's Children of a Lesser God, it was her co-star, Marlee Matlin, who took home an Oscar for her performance as a mentor at a school for the deaf. Hurt played a speech teacher. For Hurt and Matlin, their romance was off-screen as well—but it wasn't Hurt's first experience finding notoriety in his personal life.
Hurt was first married to actor Mary Beth Hurt (also Big Chill co-star) from 1971 to 1982. While he was married, he began a relationship with Sandra Jennings, whose pregnancy with his son led to Hurt's divorce from Mary Beth Hurt. Six years later a high-profile court case surfaced in which Jennings claimed that she was Hurt's common-law wife under South Carolina law and was thus entitled to a share of his earnings. A New York court ruled in Hurt's favor, but the actor continued to have a strained relationship with fame.
"Acting is a very intimate and private thing," Hurt told The New York Times in 1983. "The art of acting requires the same solitude as the art of writing. Yes, you clash with other people, but you have to learn a craft, a technique. It's work. It's strange that my acting is on my person." considered for attention, as if I need so much love or so much attention that I give up my right to be a private person."
In her 2009 memoir, Matlin details the physical and emotional abuse she experienced during their relationship. At the time of its publication, Hurt issued an apology, saying: "My own recollection is that we both apologized and both did so much to fix our lives."
In those years, Hurt also struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, and attended rehabilitation clinics. He also developed a reputation for not always being an easy ally. The New Yorker called him "notoriously temperamental." In 1989, Hurt married Heidi Henderson, whom he met in rehab. They had two children together. Hurt also had a daughter with French actress and filmmaker Sandrine Bonaire, whom he met while making the direct-to-video 1992 Albert Camus adaptation The Plague.
Among Hurt's greatest performances, James L. Brooks' 1987 comedy was Broadcast News, as a slick but mild anchorman who epitomized the emerging fusion of entertainment and journalism.
Hearst Broadcast News co-star Albert Brooks was among those who reacted to Hurt's passing Sunday. "Very sorry to hear this news," Brooks wrote on Twitter. "Working with him on 'Broadcast News' was wonderful. He will be greatly missed."
After his brisk run of the '80s, Hurt increasingly fell out of favor with filmmakers in the '90s, and some argued it was because of his reputation. However, Hurt continued to defend his point of view, telling the Los Angeles Times in 1994 that "I give more by soliciting the truth than by wandering for hopes and easy hopes."
"If a director asks me to make the audience think or feel something, I immediately rebel," Hurt said. "I am not there to make anyone else think or feel anything specific. I agree to do something that the whole piece says. Beyond that it is my sole obligation to solicit the truth of the piece. I owe nothing to anyone - which includes the director."
Still, Hurt never slowed down, accumulating credits in the '90s and '00s - Woody Allen's Alice, Wayne Wong's Smoke, Nora Efron's Michael, Franco Zeffirelli's Jane Eyre.
Hurt, always an intelligent screen presence, slowly turned into a character actor. He received his fourth Oscar nomination for his small but powerful role in David Cronenberg's 2005 thriller A History of Violence.
Hurt continued to work in the years leading up to his death: 10 episodes of Damage; A series of Marvel films, including Avengers: Endgame and Black Widow, as military officer Thaddeus Ross; 14 episodes on Amazon's Goliath.
Often, Hurt suggested that his fabled run in the '80s did more than define him as an actor.
"Success is isolated," he told The Telegraph in 2004. "Of course Oscar was isolated. In some ways, it was the opposite of my goal. I didn't want to be isolated. I didn't want anything big. I was aiming at my chest and saying: 'That Oscar The winner is, he should be.' I wanted to be an actor, so I was very confused about it. Sometimes I am still confused about it."