William Hurt

William Hurt, a leading man of 1980s Hollywood who rose to stardom as a cocky but indolent lawyer in “Body Heat,” won an Oscar for playing a gay man jailed ...

Mr. Hurt was later featured in the movies “Eyewitness” (1981), as a janitor who teams with a TV news reporter (Sigourney Weaver) to solve a murder, and “Gorky Park” (1983), based on a mystery novel by Martin Cruz Smith about a Soviet detective. Interviewed by the Times in 1989, he recalled that he once tried to escape out of a restaurant’s back door after realizing a photographer was waiting to snap his photo outside the main exit. Mr. Hurt attended Middlesex prep school in Massachusetts and Tufts University outside Boston, where he studied theology and then drama — “the next rung down on the ladder of ego,” as he put it — and received a bachelor’s degree in 1972. Beginning with “The Incredible Hulk” (2008), he appeared in several Marvel movies as Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, an Army general who becomes secretary of state. His travels took him to Ashland, Ore., where he had his breakthrough as an actor while appearing in a local production of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” “I had worked for years in complete darkness, complete doubt, complete confusion,” he later told New York magazine. Although Mr. Hurt delighted in talking about acting, he said he had little interest in the celebrity status that accompanied his success. The movie was a sultry, shadow-filled throwback to 1940s film noirs like “Double Indemnity.” And Mr. Hurt — tall, blond and blue-eyed, with a square jaw and charmingly laconic screen persona — was suddenly in great demand. Before entering movies, Mr. Hurt built an extensive portfolio of theater roles, culminating in his Tony-nominated performance in David Rabe’s dark comedy “Hurlyburly,” which was directed by Mike Nichols and opened on Broadway in 1984. Cerebral and intense, balding by his mid-30s, he studied theology in college and continued to live on the East Coast even after he began making movies. By some accounts, he could be difficult to work with; he reportedly struggled with alcohol and drug abuse, and his former girlfriend Marlee Matlin, who won an Oscar starring opposite him in “Children of a Lesser God,” said in a 2009 memoir that he physically and emotionally abused her during their relationship in the 1980s. Ebert wrote that Mr. Hurt “creates a character utterly unlike anyone else he has ever played — a frankly theatrical character, exaggerated and mannered — and yet he never seems to be reaching for effects.” The next year, he delivered his breakout performance in director Lawrence Kasdan’s neo-noir thriller “Body Heat,” as a South Florida lawyer seduced by Kathleen Turner and roped into murdering her husband.