A long career and yet the name of William Hurt remains mostly attached to a decade. These 1980s during which Hollywood entered a more ironic phase, engendered a more flashy neo-cinema, all on the surface, an art of pastiche and pose. Mad scientist becoming his own guinea pig, naive lawyer seized by lust and eaten away by a femme fatale, transsexual locked up in a South American prison… these were some of the outstanding roles of the American actor, who died of cancer. , in Portland, Ore., on March 13.
He was born in Washington on March 20, 1950 to a father who worked for the State Department and a mother employed by the Time. He spent a childhood in different countries where his father was called upon to work (Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan). He studied theology in London and Boston (Massachusetts), before joining the famous Juilliard School in New York to take drama lessons.
He began a career in the theater at the end of the 1970s. The role given to him by the Englishman Ken Russel in Beyond reality, in 1980, after a few appearances on television, launched him into the cinema. He plays a scientist practicing experiments on himself based on psychotropic drugs, until he reaches a state of prehistoric regression. body fever, by Lawrence Kasdan, the following year, is a pastiche of film noir which makes him an erotomaniac lawyer, victim of a Machiavellian heiress. The same Lawrence Kasdan integrates it, in 1983, with his generational Friends firstto a group of comedians who were all stars in the making (Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Kline, Tom Berenger, Glenn Close).
The Brazilian Hector Babenco, in his Kiss of the Spider Woman, in 1985, will offer him what will earn him an interpretation prize at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as the Oscar for best actor. It’s Luis Molina, a flamboyant homosexual, talkative drag queen locked up in a Latin American jail, regaling his fellow prisoner – a macho political prisoner – with stories intended to make them endure captivity.
A kind of incompleteness
His slightly chubby face, his childish blondness, his soft and warm voice, his broad intellectual forehead predestine him perhaps for serious jobs, as a teacher, a professor, a calm man, in titles like The Children of Silencein 1986, The doctorin 1991, both directed by Randa Haines, Plague (after Camus), by Luis Puenzo, in 1992, or characters secretly marked by life, as in Traveler in spite of himself, by Lawrence Kasdan, again, in 1988. He also tours with Woody Allen (Alice, in 1990). His Hollywood career is full of missed opportunities, instilling a sense of a kind of incompleteness. He refuses, in fact, the main roles of Misery, by Rob Reiner, in 1990, and Jurassic Park, by Steven Spielberg, in 1993. Perhaps because his ambition was elsewhere.
You have 31.11% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.