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Actor Hurt in the Wim Wenders film »To the End of the World« 1991: In the film industry he was considered a man in Marlon Brando's league
Photo: United Archives/Impress Own/Getty Images
Because the cinema is, among other things, a place of erotic dreams, the actor William Hurt was, for me, one of the most enviable people on the planet in the 1980s.
He was the man whom the heroine, played by Kathleen Turner, in »Body Heat« (1981) chooses as a bed play and assassin with the words: »I am a married woman«.
He was the guy a television producer played by Holly Hunter drags into her hotel room in Broadcast News (1987).
And he was the guy who fell in love with a beautiful freedom fighter played by Raúl Julia in The Kiss of the Spider Woman (1986), while the two men languished in a prison cell, killing time retelling film stories.
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Hurt, who died shortly before his 72nd birthday from complications from cancer, looked dazzling at the time.
A limp with a shock of blond hair, soft eyes, a square chin.
Apparently a winner.
But as early as the 1980s, at the beginning of Hurt's career - when he was making it to heights he later failed to reach - director Héctor Babenco said: »Choosing William Hurt is the promise of hell.
And that's exactly what he gives you.«
He publicly apologized for outbreaks of violence
Because the cinema is also a place of shattered prophecies, Hurt did not become the Hollywood star from the league of Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando, as many described him after his Oscar win with Babenco's "The Kiss of the Spider Woman".
Instead, he became at least as famous for his addiction as he was for his acting career.
He repeatedly went to rehab clinics.
He was accused of violence while drunk by former partners.
He apologized publicly, repeatedly described his drinking as overcome and himself as dry.
And gained a reputation among journalists as an extremely bitchy interviewee whose rebelliousness was at best comparable to that of rock star Lou Reed.
"I studied acting and not answering interview questions," he snapped at one of his interlocutors.
Like many high-calibre performers, Hurt started out in theater playing badly broken characters.
Raised in a family of US civil servants and journalists, he was educated at the prestigious Juillard School, among other places.
He had an early stage hit in the role of the unfortunate Edmund in Eugene O'Neill's grandiose family drama A Long Day's Journey into the Night.
In the cinema, Hurt was soon regarded as a specialist for heroes with scruples.
In »The Travels of Mr. Leary« from 1988, like »Body Heat« a film by director Laurence Kasdan, he was seen as a guy who earns his living as a travel guide writer until a tragedy throws him off track .
"Unmoved and unmoved, he lets everything fall on him," wrote film critic Michael Althen of the man Hurt is portraying.
The hero forces himself to say the words "as if each one froze to ice cubes in his mouth."
Years in Paris alongside Sandrine Bonnaire
For a few years in the 1990s, Hurt lived in Paris with French actress Sandrine Bonnaire, with whom he has a daughter;
he was married twice and became the father of five children.
When he decided to live fully in the United States again in the noughties, he said in an interview that he felt that not just his world, but that of all people, was shrinking.
So the question is, "Where to run away to?"
Hurt has acted in films by many major directors over the years, often not in their best works.
With Wim Wenders (»Until the End of the World«, 1991), Stephen Spielberg (»AI – Artificial Intelligence«, 2001), David Cronenberg (»A History of Violence«, 2005) and Curtis Hanson (»Too Big to Fail – The Great Crisis«, 2011).
He was Captain Ahab in a television remake of »Moby Dick« and later found fame among young cinema audiences in action films such as »Avengers: Infinity War« (2018) and »Black Widow« (2020).
The director Franco Zeffirelli, who hired him for "Jane Eyre" in the mid-1990s, called Hurt the most complicated actor he had ever met.
It's not clear if that was meant as a compliment.
What is certain is that Hurt has always had a great unpredictability on screen.
He could play fabulously innocent and incredibly treacherous people, he could quietly despair and terribly explode, repel and seduce.
And a residual doubt about his own work always shimmered through, that obviously tormenting feeling of dissatisfaction that he reliably reported in appearances beyond the screen.
"I was often angry with God and unhappy with myself," said the fine, funny, sad actor William Hurt in his later years.
"But eventually I got fed up with being fed up."