In one of his first films, “Body Heat,” he appears briefly in an eerily cold light. It’s hot in Florida and he yanks open the fridge and stands in front of it, sweaty torso. The 1981 film made William Hurt a star for a few years as a yuppie, a lawyer who prides himself on his smartness, he jogs of course and also has a mustache that doesn’t really excite him and he falls for the hottie Kathleen Turner, who ensnares him for a murderous plot. Just as Fred MacMurray fell for Barbara Stanwyck in “Double Indemnity” by Billy Wilder, whom Lawrence Kasdan used as a model for his neon noir.
William Hurt developed a cool diversity in his early films around Body Heat, in the very first, Ken Russell’s Altered States, he was a scientist who – another old Hollywood genre, the Jekyll & Hyde -Motiv with his insane scientists – experiments with unknown Mexican drugs, self-experiments in the isolation tank, he regresses and becomes a lumpy aggressive primitive man. In “Gorky Park” he plays Arkadi Renko, the Moscow investigator from the novels by Martin Cruz Smith, who always seems infinitely sad and has to compete against Lee Marvin.
Hurt’s biggest hit was “The Spider Woman’s Kiss” by Héctor Babenco, based on the novel by Manuel Puig. He is a prisoner in the dungeons of a South American dictatorship, a gay diva with fluttering colorful robes and a pinned-up turban and splayed singsong, who dwells in his memories of Hollywood’s silver screen and courts his cellmate, a political prisoner. Of course Hurt got the Oscar for this film.
Lawrence Kasdan gave him formative roles – away from the blockbuster cinema
Lawrence Kasdan then brought him back in for The Big Chill along with a few other stars-to-be Kevin Kline, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum – a celebration of American youth but sadly one of the gang had killed himself. Hurt also acted for Kasdan in “The Accidental Tourist” – a travel writer at a standstill, he fabricates his books in an armchair at home – and “I Love You to Death”, after which Kasdan turned to Kevin Kline. In 1990 Hurt completed a role for Woody Allen (“Alice”), in 1991 one for Wim Wenders, there he is a relaxed wanderer in the desert with a criminal aura: “Until the end of the world”. In the mid-90s he acted for Chantal Akerman in “A Couch in New York”, with Juliette Binoche, in a film adaptation of “The Plague” by Albert Camus, his partner is Sandrine Bonnaire, with whom he had a relationship for a number of years.
In the 1980s, Hollywood was looking for new heroes for the future, replacements for the young men of the 1970s, “Taxi Driver” Robert De Niro and “American Gigolo” Richard Gere, who were traumatized down to the smallest physical movement. As Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford was the man of the hour, physically skilled and very sophisticated. You have to look at the films Hurt made with Lawrence Kasdan in the light of this blockbuster development – Kasdan had previously done some great scripting on the Star Wars films, The Empire Strikes Back. In the early 1990s, William Hurt was asked to play the main action role in “Jurassic Park”, he declined, preferring to stick with small films. So he played in “Smoke” by Wayne Wang alongside the Scorsese actor Harvey Keitel – or at the theater, also off-Broadway.
“Success isolates,” he once said in an interview, “the Oscar certainly isolated me. In a way, that was exactly the opposite of what I wanted to achieve.” There is a gentle self-confidence, even self-satisfaction in his late film appearances, an animalistic unpredictability. There is always an unfathomable smile on his face. That may sometimes be invisible, a kind of Cheshire smile, like Lewis Carroll.