William Hurt. For cinemagoers of a certain age, the name conjures up the brighter memories of an era. No actor had a classier time of it in the 1980s. If a complex human drama managed to muscle its way past Schwarzenegger and Stallone up onto the big screen, Hurt was most likely the male lead. Ramrod-tall, blue-eyed and aquiline, with a high forehead swept clear of thin, fair hair, he even looked clever, like a tweedy young professor of letters on secondment to Hollywood.
A reminder. Those years in the sun began promptly in 1980, with Ken Russell’s Altered States, in which he plays a professor whose experiments with hallucinogens go wildly awry; continued with the steamy noir thriller Body Heat (1981), with Kathleen Turner; then steered him into ensemble comedy in The Big Chill and Soviet sleuthing in Gorky Park (both 1983). Hurt won an Oscar for the prison drama Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), as did his deaf co-star — and girlfriend — Marlee Matlin for Children of a Lesser God (1986). Broadcast News (1987), where he’s a slick television news reporter, and The Accidental Tourist (1988), in which he plays a lost soul who has recently lost his son and his marriage, completed this, in retrospect, astonishing run.
But then that, in terms of lead roles in films that people wanted to see, was that. At 38, Hurt had somehow contrived to match the career longevity of a pretty young actress. He did plough on, but suddenly the work seemed, as the title of the low-budget British film about fostering he made with Chris Menges in 1994 has it, Second Best. That decade saw him doing sci-fi, slapstick, romantic comedy, none of them genres that agreed with the cool intensity of his Nordic demeanour.
Not that Hurt sees it that way. “People would say, ‘Well, where’d you go?” I’d say, ‘I was there.’ It’s funny, because if you don’t give people what they expect, they think you’re failing. What if you know you’ve just done great work and you’re the only one that thinks so? You’re going to believe them? Or you’re going to go with what you know?” He might conceivably say that of his role in Istvan Szabo’s Sunshine. But Lost in Space?
Something undoubtedly happened, and it may not be divisible from the bad headlines crowding around Hurt, which resurfaced only last month when contents of Matlin’s new memoir were aired. Their two-year relationship, she revealed, involved drug abuse and physical abuse. “My own recollection,” he said in a statement, “is that we both apologised.” In 1989, he was also involved in a highly public alimony case in which the lawyer for his former partner, Sandra Jennings, railing against a ruling that the couple had never been legally married, accused the female judge of being in love with Hurt. An understandable predilection: at the time, a lot of filmgoers were.
If producers got jumpy about Hurt’s press, it may also be that the industry stopped making the kind of films that suited his performing style. There was a touch of Cary Grant about Hurt, a besuited civility. In the 1990s, the buttock-bearing leads went to the more animal Michael Douglas.
Even so, pedigree will out. Since 2005, Hurt has been eye-catchingly cast by David Cronenberg in A History of Violence, by Robert De Niro in The Good Shepherd and by Sean Penn in Into the Wild. Julie Delpy has him coming up in her latest, The Countess. Note that three of those directors are really actors. He has also been a sinisterly enigmatic presence as a conflicted scientist in the thriller series Damages, currently mid-run on BBC1.
Yet it is Endgame, a compelling new Channel 4 drama written by Paula Milne, that finally finds Hurt in a lead role, doing what he really does best. In an account of the secret negotiations at a country house in Somerset that preceded the freeing of Nelson Mandela, Hurt plays Willie Esterhuyse, a professor of philosophy at Stellenbosch University who is apartheid’s intellectual fig leaf. Around the table with him are Chiwetel Ejiofor as Thabo Mbeki, the ANC man who went on to become president of South Africa, and Jonny Lee Miller as Michael Young, the businessman who set up the negotiations with the collusion of his boss at Consolidated Gold Fields, Rudolph Agnew (Derek Jacobi), billing them as “research and development” to disguise them from the shareholders. Over in Robben Island, Mandela (Clarke Peters) waits.
There’s less hair, more midriff and a clipped Afrikaner accent, but the hallmarks of Hurt’s finest performances are there: the moral intelligence, that almost physical air of watchfulness, the careful delineation of speech and gesture. Even if he insists he's never been away, it’s good to have him back.
Of course Hurt being Hurt, he had to rip himself apart before he took the role. “I’m torn about docudrama,” he says. “I don’t personally buy into that nonsense about ‘we can feel more because it’s based on a true story’. What’s true? All history is interpretation. But I do think there is a point in making this project, and I searched for it. Mandela is obviously very much one of my heroes. The time was extremely important to me personally. I was turning 40.” (He has just turned 59.)
You need only sit in a pub with Hurt for an evening to get an inkling of how and why the scripts stopped coming his way. He is a man of opinions, intense, firebrand, nose-thumbing, bird-flipping opinions on just about everything, but principally on the evils of the Hollywood machine. He makes for terrific company, just so long as you don’t have to work with him.
From the way he tells the story of how he got involved in Altered States, it would have been clear from the start that he was from the awkward squad. He was three years out of the Juilliard drama school, where he drank in the Stanislavskian philosophy that acting is “pick and shovel work”, as he calls it. “I was doing ensemble repertory work. I was happy.” He had already decided he would not make films. “I really knew it was not for me. I do believe that women need nine months and I need six weeks.” Then, one day, on the way to an audition, he met a producer who told him about a script based on a novel by Paddy Chayefsky, whose recent films included The Hospital and Network. “I only knew one person in the film world I respected. Paddy Chayefsky owned his own work. No writer owns his own work. The first thing they did to disenfranchise all artists was to buy the writer’s work.”
Hurt was lured into reading a script about alternative states of consciousness — “And I couldn’t stand up for 45 minutes, because it was every idea I had been thinking about. I went back and said, ‘I can’t make movies, because I’m too thin-skinned. I’ll wither under the assault of generalised fame. But you have to make it.’ ” The way he tells it, the producers had already seen 500 actors and would pull the plug unless Hurt agreed to do it. So he negotiated from a position of strength.
“I had no obligations to do PR. I had a guarantee that I was personally in control of the character. I had director approval until 48 hours before we started filming. And I had those protections in my contract for many, many, many years. You couldn’t make me market a film that I didn’t approve of. You couldn’t make me sell something where I thought I’d been lied to or cheated. You couldn’t make me smile on something I didn’t want to smile on.”
He started as he meant to continue. For his second film, Eyewitness, he asked the producers to give half his fee to the fringe theatres of Off Off Broadway. They refused, so he gave it away himself. Then came Body Heat, the first of his collaborations with Lawrence Kasdan. “I spent the first six hours with Larry Kasdan telling him why he couldn’t direct it. He didn’t know what he had. It was a gem, pure and simple.” Did he take kindly to that? “Yes, he did. He listened. Because I was the only person who was honest with him.”
By that time, was he hooked? “A person doesn’t like to admit that, but maybe.” And so he rose, picking fights and good scripts along the way. For him, The Big Chill was “almost a classic, but not”. Kasdan lost final cut, and out went the flashback coda (and, famously, Kevin Costner with it). “I always knew that what was susceptible in the screenplay was the most audacious stroke in it. And as actors, we had to prove we were good enough to play ourselves younger than currently. I was the only one who had done it before.” This turns out to be a familiar refrain. Hurt on the small print of Hollywood’s standard contract: “I’m the only actor I know who’s even read it.” Hurt on making an effort to find out about lenses and cameras: “I don’t know anybody else who asks the DP (director of photography), ‘What lens you got?’ ”
His carefully acquired knowledge paid off most handsomely in Broadcast News, in which he played a newscaster who makes grace under pressure seem vacuously easy. For three years running, he was nominated for an Oscar. He won the first as a crossdressing convict in Spider Woman. He did the film on spec, for no pay upfront; and, as you might guess, was “tremendously conflicted” about receiving the statuette. “It was also the night they gave one to the producer of 007 for selling more theatre tickets than anybody ever sold. So I’m going, ‘Is this the same golden dildo they ram down your throat to make sure you never work unconditionally again?’
I thought I was going to have a couple of drinks and watch the other salivating guys in the penguin suits, like you study a character. But when they called my name out, I really thought, ‘Oh no, no, no, no, don’t put that target on my chest.’ I went up on stage, and Sally Field put it in my hand and I said, ‘Sally, what the hell do I do with this?’ She looked at me hard, because she knew me — she was a wonderful woman — and she said, ‘You live with it.’ ”
However easy that relationship with the camera, relationships with humans have proved less governable. He married the actress Mary Beth Hurt at 21, then went on to have four children with three further women, including the French actress Sandrine Bonnaire (there were no children with Matlin). It is no surprise to learn that his own childhood was spent on the move. He was born in 1950 in Washington DC. His father worked for the State Department, so Hurt spent his first six years in the South Pacific: “I spoke sentences of Guamanian before I spoke English.” Then his parents divorced and his mother remarried the son of the founder of Time magazine. To visit his father, he had to board planes bound for the post-imperial Third World: Lahore, Khartoum, Mogadishu. Needless to say, Hurt now regards it all as character-building.
“You see an immense amount when you’re young that you can’t see when you’re past puberty, because by then you represent something. I don’t have a problem with poor people. I don’t have a problem with black people. I was living in, on and around them from the time I was a baby. So I didn’t see any difference. I just didn’t see my best friends as black or white.”
Whatever the inside dope on his private life, when it comes to work, Hurt has no patience with the idea that he became difficult. “‘I hear that you’re obstreperous,’” he says in a poor-diddums voice. “‘You must be neurotic or temperamental or something worse.’ ‘No. No. You’re wrong.’ ‘Oh, you told me I’m wrong. You are obstreperous.’ You hear what I’m saying? You can’t win that way. Really, all you can do is just do damn good work.” And if damn good work involves pulling colleagues up by the bootstraps, so be it. Do they welcome that? “Not initially. But if they get six weeks, and if you get a chance to prove, rather than just say, that you believe in their work as much as you believe in your own, I’ve never walked away from an actor who didn’t appreciate being treated as a human being.”
Hurt, in short, would seem to be unvisited by doubt. In an industry that, the way he would see it, requires too much subservience from its workers, this has been a debilitating quality. It is actor-directors who, above all, have started to see the point of him again. In the time it takes him to sink three slow pints of bitter, I ask, in as many different ways as I can think of, if he admits the wheels might have loosened even a little after The Accidental Tourist.
“I’ve never been sorry about anything I chose to do,” is what he says. Another of the things he has no doubt about is the rightness of that prediction of his to the producers of Altered States. “Fame,” he says, “is not a happy condition for me. Having people generalise about you with any information about you whatsoever, contempt prior to investigation — it’s a remarkable prejudice. ‘Aren’t you who I think you are?’ ‘No, ma’am. I don’t know anything for sure in life except one thing: I’m sure I’m not who you think I am. I’m positive of that. Now can I go my wandering way?’”
