A gifted, versatile, and unpredictable actor who has made a strong impression on the screen in a relatively modest number of starring roles since beginning his film career in 1980. Tall and handsome, he could have easily been a romantic Hollywood leading man. Instead, he has chosen to portray an odd and intriguing assortment of characters, establishing himself as a serious actor who cares little for the trappings of stardom. William Hurt's father was a U.S. State Department official, and the young boy lived in a number of exotic South Pacific locales before his parents finally divorced. As a teenager, he lived briefly in New York City before his mother married Henry Luce III, the son of the founder of Time magazine. William Hurt then found himself continuing his education at the elite Middlesex School in Massachusetts. It was there that he started to act.
He began his college career at Tufts University as a theology major but soon switched to theater. Upon graduation, he attended Juilliard to further his study of acting. Next, he traveled to Oregon, where he acted in a theater festival presentation of Long Day's Journey into Night in 1975. William Hurt later made his major breakthrough in the Circle Repertory Company production of My Life in 1977, winning an Obie (Off-Broadway) Award for his performance.
William Hurt continued acting for Circle Rep through the rest of the 1970s, refusing film offers until finally taking a leading role in Ken Russell's Altered States (1980). The movie received mixed reviews, but the actor was acknowledged by the critics. He was next cast as the hero in the thriller Eyewitness (1981), and both he and the movie enjoyed a modest success. His third feature, the FILM NOIR suspense film Body Heat (1981), written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, was a solid success for both William Hurt and his costar, KATHLEEN TURNER (in her film debut).
William Hurt, for his part, wasn't terribly interested in stardom, except for the clout it gave him to help get good roles. He happily joined the large ensemble cast of LAWRENCE KASDAN's highly regarded The Big Chill (1983), deliberately played down his role as the Russian detective in the disappointing Gorky Park (1983), and then took the offbeat role of a daydreaming homosexual prisoner in the low-budget Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), an art-house hit that brought William Hurt an Oscar as Best Actor for his unconventional portrayal.
The actor has continued to pursue good roles wherever he can find them, often returning to the stage to work. In films, he has continued to take on challenging roles, such as in Children of a Lesser God (1986), knowing that deaf costar Marlee Matlin would inevitably be the movie's focal point, and Broadcast News (1987) in which he played an anchorman of mediocre intelligence, knowing that actress Holly Hunter and actor Albert Brooks would steal the show. Happily, a number of critics commented on William Hurt's understated performance. He also reteamed with his Body Heat director Lawrence Kasdan and costar Kathleen Turner to give yet another quietly powerful performance in The Accidental Tourist (1988).
During the 1990s, William Hurt alternated between playing leads and supporting roles in a wide variety of films. He starred in Until the End of the World (1991), directed and written by Wim Wenders, the talented German director. The following year, he had the lead in an adaptation of Albert Camus's The Plague, and he played a Welsh postmaster in Second Best (1994). One of his best roles during the decade was as the tormented Rochester in still another adaptation (1996) of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. In One True Thing (1998) he played a professor whose wife is dying of cancer. He had supporting roles in several films, the most notable of which was A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001).
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1. Abbot and Costello were very popular during the sound era
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