His son Alexander Damage declared the dying in a assertion but did not give a trigger. Mr. Hurt unveiled in 2018 that he experienced been diagnosed with terminal prostate most cancers.
A Washington native who appeared in extra than 100 monitor roles, Mr. Damage manufactured his movie debut in the 1980 psychedelic horror film “Altered States,” actively playing an obsessed scientist whose experiments with sensory deprivation direct him to switch into a primeval, apelike creature. The next 12 months, he delivered his breakout effectiveness in director Lawrence Kasdan’s neo-noir thriller “Body Warmth,” as a South Florida attorney seduced by Kathleen Turner and roped into murdering her husband.
The motion picture was a sultry, shadow-stuffed throwback to 1940s movie noirs like “Double Indemnity.” And Mr. Hurt — tall, blond and blue-eyed, with a sq. jaw and charmingly laconic screen persona — was all of a sudden in wonderful demand. He reunited with Kasdan to participate in a cynical, drug-addicted Vietnam War veteran in “The Significant Chill” (1983), and acquired three consecutive Academy Award nominations for best actor, which include as an idealistic trainer of the deaf in “Children of a Lesser God” (1986) and a handsome but ethically compromised newscaster in “Broadcast News” (1987).
“His expertise is to have confidence in that a lot less is extra,” Kasdan advised movie critic Roger Ebert just after directing Mr. Damage in a 3rd movie, “The Accidental Tourist” (1988). “I never feel any one does that better in American performing. It’s to believe in that the camera sees all the things if you are experience it and if you are correct — and Monthly bill is correct.”
Mr. Harm won the Oscar for “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1985), a drama tailored from Manuel Puig’s novel of the very same name. His overall performance, as a gay window dresser who trades tales with his prison cellmate (Raul Julia), secured his track record for playing multilayered characters with a seemingly effortless charisma. Ebert wrote that Mr. Harm “creates a character totally in contrast to any individual else he has ever performed — a frankly theatrical character, exaggerated and mannered — and nonetheless he by no means looks to be achieving for consequences.”
Ahead of getting into movies, Mr. Hurt designed an intensive portfolio of theater roles, culminating in his Tony-nominated efficiency in David Rabe’s darkish comedy “Hurlyburly,” which was directed by Mike Nichols and opened on Broadway in 1984. He explained himself early on as a character actor trapped “in a leading man’s physique,” and tended towards supporting roles later on in his profession, which include in Steven Spielberg’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” (2001), M. Night time Shyamalan’s “The Village” (2004), Stephen Gaghan’s “Syriana” (2005) and David Cronenberg’s action thriller “A Historical past of Violence” (2005), which attained him his fourth Oscar nomination, this time for most effective supporting actor.
Mr. Damage was in some approaches an not likely film star. Cerebral and intense, balding by his mid-30s, he researched theology in college and continued to stay on the East Coastline even following he began producing videos. By some accounts, he could be challenging to do the job with he reportedly struggled with liquor and drug abuse, and his previous girlfriend Marlee Matlin, who won an Oscar starring opposite him in “Children of a Lesser God,” reported in a 2009 memoir that he physically and emotionally abused her through their connection in the 1980s. “My very own recollection is that we both of those apologized and both equally did a fantastic deal to heal our lives,” Mr. Harm stated in a statement at the time.
He rarely spoke about his private lifestyle in interviews, preferring instead to supply impassioned monologues about consumerism, the connection amongst church and state, the science of condensation or the “homogenized disruptive entities” that built acting challenging.
“Elliptical? Philosophical? I can be that way,” he instructed the New York Moments in 1994, prior to turning to the that means of daily life. “There’s dread or religion. If you are living by worry, then you’re often looking for safety. If you’re residing by religion, then you are normally searching for flexibility.” He added that when it arrived to achieving a faith-filled existence, “You just continue to keep at it. Defeating fear is not a light-weight change. For most of us, it’s daily work.”
William McChord Damage was born in Washington on March 20, 1950. His father labored on U.S. international aid courses and was posted to Guam, where Mr. Hurt used his early several years ahead of his mothers and fathers divorced. He was 10 when his mother, who worked on small business operations at Time Inc., married Henry Luce III, a son of the media company’s co-founder.
Mr. Harm attended Middlesex prep faculty in Massachusetts and Tufts University outside the house Boston, wherever he analyzed theology and then drama — “the next rung down on the ladder of ego,” as he put it — and gained a bachelor’s diploma in 1972. He enrolled in the performing plan at the Juilliard School in Manhattan but chafed at the school’s rigorous disciplinary necessities, leaving in 1975 to embark on a cross-state road excursion.
His travels took him to Ashland, Ore., the place he had his breakthrough as an actor whilst appearing in a area output of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” “I experienced labored for several years in entire darkness, finish doubt, comprehensive confusion,” he afterwards informed New York magazine. “And then, a single day, I walked out onstage and realized I experienced some craft. It was just there — and it felt so good.”
Returning to New York, he appeared in off-Broadway plays with the Circle Repertory Organization, successful an Obie Award in 1977 for “My Life” and starring in the primary production of Lanford Wilson’s “Fifth of July.” He thought of Hollywood a “cultural wasteland,” but signed on to “Altered States” soon after reading through the script, by acclaimed screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky five days following filming finished, he returned to New York to star in a Circle Rep manufacturing of “Hamlet.”
Mr. Hurt was later highlighted in the movies “Eyewitness” (1981), as a janitor who groups with a Tv information reporter (Sigourney Weaver) to resolve a murder, and “Gorky Park” (1983), dependent on a mystery novel by Martin Cruz Smith about a Soviet detective. By the 1990s, he was appearing in extra offbeat, unbiased films, declining a role in “Jurassic Park” to show up in films like Wim Wenders’s “Until the Stop of the World” (1991) and Wayne Wang’s “Smoke” (1995).
He continued to function with significant directors, appearing in Woody Allen’s “Alice” (1990), Nora Ephron’s “Michael” (1996) and Franco Zeffirelli’s “Jane Eyre” (1996), though also signing up for huge-finances initiatives this sort of as “Lost in Space” (1998), a widely panned adaptation of the 1960s science-fiction collection. Beginning with “The Amazing Hulk” (2008), he appeared in several Marvel motion pictures as Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, an Military basic who becomes secretary of state.
Mr. Damage also labored on tv, showing up in the legal drama “Goliath” and earning Emmy Award nominations in 2009, for his visitor purpose in the drama series “Damages,” and in 2011, for starring as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in the Television set movie “Too Big to Are unsuccessful,” about the 2008 economic disaster.
His marriages to actress Mary Beth Harm and Heidi Henderson ended in divorce. He also had a romance in the 1980s with Sandra Jennings, who unsuccessfully claimed in courtroom that she had been Mr. Hurt’s popular-regulation spouse and was entitled to a share of his earnings.
Mr. Damage experienced four little ones, which includes a son, Alexander, from his romantic relationship with Jennings two sons, Samuel and William Jr., from his next relationship and a daughter, Jeanne Bonnaire-Harm, from a marriage with French actress and filmmaker Sandrine Bonnaire. Facts on survivors was not straight away offered.
While Mr. Harm delighted in speaking about performing, he explained he had minor desire in the celeb standing that accompanied his achievement. Interviewed by the Periods in 1989, he recalled that he when tried to escape out of a restaurant’s back door just after recognizing a photographer was ready to snap his photograph outside the house the most important exit. The proprietor declined his request, declaring, “You wanted to be the celeb. You wished this.”
“And I advised him, ‘You really do not know what I needed. How dare you explain to me what I wished? Which is not what I needed.’ What I wished to do was anything very generous. And I continue to want that, and I get good pleasure out of it,” he reported. “Because it’s a little something I can share. It is my window. It is what I glance at attractiveness through.”
