William Hurt
THERE was a time when you could judge the quality of a film by the simple fact that William Hurt was in it. The actor, who passed away earlier this week at the age of 71, enjoyed a purple patch in the 1980s that few could equal.
If that decade re-defined the term 'overblown' and ushered in a garish new dawn for the big budget blockbuster, Hurt brought a welcome seriousness and a studied elegance to many of the films he graced with his presence.
For a start, there's the small matter of his Oscar win for his memorable performance as a gay inmate in a South American prison in the now mostly forgotten Kiss Of The Spider Woman in 1985. The story goes he recoiled in horror when his name was called out as winner, the stage-trained actor in him feeling he would now be forever pigeon holed and targeted as a celebrity rather than as a serious artist.
That never really happened and Hurt never quite ascended into the A-lister world such acclaim could have brought, but you can see why such a rise may have frightened him. A serious minded Thespian who usually gave off a faintly academic air on screen, he was never really cut out for the Hollywood fame game.
Despite a further brace of Academy nominations for his roles as a teacher in a school for the deaf in Children Of A Lesser God (1986) and a charming but thick news anchor man in Broadcast News (1987), Hurt mostly delivered his best work in the company of other fine actors, adding much to the likes of Body Heat (1981) and The Big Chill (1983).
Both those films, while differing wildly in tone – one a moody film noir-wannabe, the other a light comedy drama – marked Hurt out as a go to guy for all manner of on screen supports in that decade that humanity forgot. Both directed by Lawrence Kasdan, those films couldn't be more 80s if they tried. They haven't dated too well, but Hurt still manages to lift them, as he usually did at that time.
My favourite Hurt performance which, like The Big Chill, also dates from 1983, is Gorky Park. A dark little fable about the Cold War in all its shadowy glory, Hurt played Soviet Detective Arkady Renko, who stumbles across all manner of nastiness when he investigates a triple murder at a Moscow amusement park. As he so often was, Hurt is cold and believable but with a whole lot of anguish bubbling away just beneath the surface.
There were interesting diversions down the subsequent decades, and even another Oscar nomination for his turn as a ruthless gangster hunting down his own brother in 2005's A History Of Violence, and sometimes you'd get a glimpse of the cerebral character actor playing slightly out of place figures with a distinctive, slightly out of place charm.
Mostly though, it was money-spinning turns in Marvel adaptations that took up his time. All perfectly acceptable of course, but they rarely let Hurt cut loose the way he had several decades previously.
