William Hurt Biography

A cerebral leading man and offbeat character actor, William Hurt was one of the more distinctive Hollywood stars of the 1980s.

Hurt won an Oscar for his leading role as a story-spinning prisoner in the 1985 film version of Manuel Puig‘s Kiss of the Spider Woman (with Raul Julia), but he is more fondly remembered for his starmaking turns in two films by Lawrence Kasdan: the sexy noir thriller Body Heat (1981, with Hurt as a big lug seduced by Kathleen Turner) and the nostalgic baby boomer flick The Big Chill (1983, with Hurt as a disillusioned Vietnam vet).

He was also Oscar-nominated for for his work in Children of a Lesser God (1986), Broadcast News (1987), and A History of Violence (2005, as Viggo Mortensen‘s mean mobster brother).

With his long jaw and thinning sandy hair, Hurt often played ambitious characters who were by turns earnest, sensitive, and hot-headed. in the 1990s he was less prominent on screen, though he played Rochester in Jane Eyre (1996, with Charlotte Gainsbourg as Jane) and galactic explorer John Robinson in the big-budget Lost in Space (1998, with Mimi Rogers).

In later years he worked steadily on stage around the world and popped up in smaller roles on screen. Hurt’s other films include Syriana (2005), The Good Shepherd (2006, directed by Robert DeNiro), Into the Wild (2007, starring Emile Hirsch), and the TV movie Too Big to Fail (2011, as former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson). He also played super-patriot Gen. Thaddeus Ross in five Marvel movies, from The Incredible Hulk (2008) through Black Widow (2021). The latter movie became his final film role.