William Hurt

William McChord Hurt, born on March 20, 1950, in Washington, D.C., was an American actor whose career spanned stage, film, and television over more than four decades. He died on March 13, 2022. Among his accolades were an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, a Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor, a Theatre World Award, and an Obie Award, as well as nominations for five Golden Globe Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Tony Award.

Hurt was the son of Claire Isabel McGill, who worked for Time Inc., and Alfred McChord Hurt, who worked for the United States Agency for International Development and the State Department. He had two brothers, and he lived with his father in Lahore, Mogadishu, and Khartoum. His parents divorced, and in 1960 his mother married Henry Luce III, a son of publisher Henry Luce. Hurt attended the Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, where he served as vice-president of the Dramatics Club and took lead roles in school productions, graduating in 1968. He went on to study theology at Tufts University, earning a BA magna cum laude in 1972, before turning to acting and enrolling in the Drama Division at the Juilliard School, where he trained from 1972 to 1976.

His professional stage career began in earnest at the Circle Repertory Company, where he was a member of the acting company from 1977 to 1989. His debut there, in Corinne Jacker's My Life, earned him an Obie Award. The 1978 Theatre World Award recognized his performances in Fifth of July, Ulysses in Traction, and Lulu. In 1979, he played Hamlet under the direction of Marshall W. Mason, opposite Lindsay Crouse and Beatrice Straight. His off-Broadway credits also included Shakespeare's Henry V in 1975 and A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1982. Hurt made his Broadway debut in 1984 in David Rabe's dark comedy Hurlyburly, playing a Hollywood casting director, a performance that earned him a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play.

Hurt's film career began with Ken Russell's science-fiction feature Altered States in 1980, for which he received a Golden Globe nomination for New Star of the Year. His performance opposite Kathleen Turner in Lawrence Kasdan's neo-noir Body Heat in 1981 brought him wider recognition, and he went on to collaborate with Kasdan again in The Big Chill in 1983 and The Accidental Tourist in 1988, both of which received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture. In 1983 he also appeared in the thriller Gorky Park opposite Lee Marvin. His role as a gay prisoner in Hector Babenco's Kiss of the Spider Woman in 1985 earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor as well as the Best Male Performance Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. He received consecutive Oscar nominations for Best Actor for Children of a Lesser God in 1986 and Broadcast News in 1987, the latter of which was added to the National Film Registry in the Library of Congress in 2018.

From the 1990s onward, Hurt appeared in a broad range of film and television projects. His notable film roles during this period included Dark City, Lost in Space, Sunshine, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Tuck Everlasting, The Village, Syriana, Into the Wild, Mr. Brooks, and The Yellow Handkerchief. His performance in A History of Violence in 2005, in which he played a powerful crime boss in under ten minutes of screen time, earned him a fourth Oscar nomination, this time for Best Supporting Actor. He starred in the Sci Fi Channel miniseries Frank Herbert's Dune in 2000, playing Duke Leto Atreides, and appeared in a segment of the Stephen King anthology Nightmares and Dreamscapes. He also performed in Vanya, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, at the Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, Oregon.

In June 2007, Marvel Studios announced that Hurt would portray General Thaddeus Ross in The Incredible Hulk, released in 2008 alongside Edward Norton, Liv Tyler, and Tim Roth. He reprised the role in four additional Marvel Cinematic Universe films: Captain America: Civil War in 2016, Avengers: Infinity War in 2018, Avengers: Endgame in 2019, and Black Widow in 2021. On television, he joined the FX legal drama Damages in 2009 as a series regular playing a corporate whistleblower opposite Glenn Close and Marcia Gay Harden, earning a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. In 2010 he played United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson in the HBO film Too Big to Fail, an adaptation of Andrew Ross Sorkin's book, which brought him a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie. He also starred as Captain Ahab in a 2011 television adaptation of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, and later appeared in the legal drama series Goliath from 2016 to 2021 and the thriller series Condor from 2018 to 2020. One of his final screen appearances was opposite F. Murray Abraham in a standalone episode of Mythic Quest in 2021.