William Hurt Has Died At 71

This is bound to hit a lot of 1980s film fans pretty hard (to be honest, this news also probably isn’t great for people who can appreciate a signature voice). Oscar-winning actor William Hurt, whose career ran over a solid four decades and covered a shockingly diverse amount of genres, has died at the age of 71.

Deadline reports that William Hurt’s son Will confirmed the news that his father had died yesterday, one week before his 72nd birthday.

“It is with great sadness that the Hurt family mourns the passing of William Hurt, beloved father and Oscar winning actor, on March 13, 2022, one week before his 72nd birthday,” his son wrote. “He died peacefully, among family, of natural causes. The family requests privacy at this time.”

It was announced back in 2018 that William Hurt had received a terminal prostate cancer diagnosis, and that it began to spread to his bones. He died at his home in Portland, Oregon, and is survived by his four children.

William Hurt started his career in acting after being the vice president of his fancy private high school’s drama club. He applied to Julliard, got in, and spent the latter part of the 1970s acting in stage plays. William Hurt was a thespian, but that didn’t last too long, because in 1980 he was cast in the weird body horror film Altered States. After that, William Hurt appeared in some of the most 1980s movies of the 1980s, like Body Heat, The Big Chill, and Gorky Park. Over the years of 1985, 1986, and 1987, William Hurt was nominated for back-to-back-to-back Best Actor Academy Awards, for Kiss of the Spider Woman (which he won for), then Children of a Lesser God, and finally Broadcast News. Broadcast News is probably one of William Hurt’s most cult film roles. Like, do not get a film person started on Broadcast News, or you’ll be in for at least 90 minutes of how Holly Hunter should have seen through William Hurt’s fake on-screen ears in the first place and gotten with Albert Brooks.

He continued to work steadily after all those Oscar nominations, just in the kind of stuff that maybe doesn’t really lend itself much to awards season. Weird stuff like Until the End of the World and romantic dramas like The Accidental Tourist, or the truly bizarre fever dream that was John Travolta playing an angel in Michael, and box office popcorn movies like the Lost in Space big-screen reboot or A.I. Artificial Intelligence. In 2005 he appeared as Viggo Mortensen’s mob boss brother in A History of Violence, which got William Hurt a Best Supporting Actor nomination. He continued to appear in critically acclaimed films until 2008, when he made a very smart decision for his bank accounts, by getting into superhero movies. William Hurt appeared in The Incredible Hulk, then Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, and Black Widow, as Thaddeus Ross, the US General who revives the super soldier project, which gives all those superheroes their jobs.

On TV, William Hurt showed up in several series, most notably on Damages, where he was eventually nominated for a Primetime Emmy, and the HBO banking crisis film Too Big to Fail.

Of course, there’s no good time to talk about the elephant in William Hurt’s personal life waiting room, which is his extremely messy 2-year relationship with fellow Oscar winner Marlee Matlin, who was 19 at the start of their relationship and was 16 years younger than him. Marlee and William started dating after working on Children of a Lesser God, and according to Marlee’s 2009 memoir I’ll Scream Later, Marlee accused William of being a drunk and an abuser. William Hurt later addressed their relationship and the allegations made in Marlee’s memoirs, blaming their shit relationship on both of their drug issues, and saying that they’ve both grown as people since then.

William Hurt has been in a ton of stuff, but personally, I could never hear his name without immediately thinking of The Big Chill, and of course that triggers a cellular-level response in my brain to start playing “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” by The Temptations. So we’ll end with this iconic moment.

Pic: INSTAR