William Hurt, a Hollywood actor who won an Oscar for "Kiss of the Spider Woman", the Cannes Film Festival and the British Academy of Film Awards, starred in the Marvel Universe "General Ross", and has been performing for more than 40 years, passed away on March 13, 2022.
William Hurt's son confirmed the news: "William Hurt, the beloved father and Oscar-winning actor, passed away on March 13, exactly the week before his 72nd birthday. ”
Three Oscars, two Emmys, six Golden Globes, and a Cannes film star, more than four decades of career, Hurt was once the Closest Hollywood temperament to the British actor of the American actor, warm and mellow, elegant and charming.
However, William Hurt in the eighties and William Hurt after 2008 are not the same Hutt. In the eighties, he was really charming, and he dared to try anything, but he could bend and be gentle and weird, and he didn't know how he would become a screw in Marvel and play the solidified role of General Ross.
Like his famous film The Unexpected Traveler, Hurt's screen life is full of accidents — he constantly deviates from the so-called mainstream, but falls into another mainstream.
From the beginning, William Hurt's goal in life was always to be an actor, like many religious people, such as director Martin Scorsese, who initially wanted to become a priest in the service of God. However, after finishing seminary, he became interested in acting and soon transferred to the Juilliard School, the world's most renowned acting university. After several years of stage performances, he quickly got the opportunity to star in his first film, starring in the great director Ken Russell's The Great Search for the Soul.
It's a pretty cult horror movie. William Hurt plays a very strange scientist in the film, in order to explore his imaginary heterogeneous space, he does not hesitate to experiment with his own body, and finally turns himself into a terrible monster. Just by looking at the stills, you can see that even in the eighties, when the wind was blowing the horror movie boom, this was still a fairly high-energy movie. With this film, William Hurt is also a little famous, especially in the single circle of horror genre films.
But he's not limited to horror movies. The following year, William Hurt chose a very bold opportunity to star as a perverted lawyer in an erotic thriller called "Body Heat", and played a murderous unrequited love affair with actress Catherine Turner.
A lonely young woman seduces a young lawyer with no future and seduces him to kill her rich husband. It is such a story that is unethical, and even more shocking is the unprecedented scale of freedom in the eighties. The bumpy flesh of the young woman Catherine, the self-indulgent depravity of the little lawyer Hurt, is full of the taste of pleasure. Sex, murder, seduction, all alive and bloody on the big screen, made Body Heat one of the most infamous and greatest erotic thrillers in film history.
From priest to stage actor, from the male protagonist of a horror movie to an erotic movie star. This was William Hurt's first transformation.
In the following eighties, the young William Hurt was always trying, always subverting himself, subverting himself with this super high frequency, laying his own golden age.
After playing "Body Heat", he did not linger between the beds, but instead he performed the new work of "Body Heat" director Lawrence Cassdan, the literary film "The Great Cold"; and then the spy thriller film "Gorky Park Massacre". Then there is the "Kiss of the Spider Woman", which made him the emperor of the three major film festivals.
But after the gay role of "Spider-Woman's Kiss", the following year, he played a very patient and loving teacher, and staged a tragic love affair with Mary Matlin, who was also deaf in real life, in "Out of Favor with God's Children", which also brought him an Oscar nomination. The following year, in 1987, "Radio News" earned him another Oscar nomination.
Entering the Oscars for three consecutive years, you can imagine how beautiful William Hurt was in his early 30s that year. And in these three films with very different styles, the roles he played are also very different.
Then it went into the nineties, a bit of a mess – who wasn't chaotic in the '90s?
Wilhelm Hurt has performed in a large number of art films, such as German director Wim Wenders's "Until the End of the World", Belgian director Chantel Ackermann's "Psychologist on the Couch"; and "Priceless Affection" with Aunt May and Renee Zellweger. Of course, compared to the personality of the eighties, these works in the nineties are slightly mediocre, and there are not many opportunities for William Hurt to play, but it is like using his glory in the 80s to help other actors in the film lift the car.
For example, in 2005's "History of Violence", Hurt was nominated for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for playing a cold underworld boss in the film, but in fact, this role is very simple for him, after all, he only performed for about ten minutes. But the role has earned Hurt an Oscar nomination for more than a decade, and it seems to be the beginning of Hurt's third amazing transformation — three years later, he entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe and became the more familiar General Ross today.
From 2008's "Invincible Hulk" to "Captain America 3: Civil War", "Avengers: Infinity War", "Avengers 4: Endgame" and "Black Widow", Hurt has continuously appeared in various Marvel movies as General Ross, easily starring as the Hulk's nemesis, former father-in-law, and his official position has also become higher and higher, from the initial Defense General to the representative, and finally became the US Secretary of State, successfully transforming into the spokesperson for the national evil machine in the Marvel Universe.
This transformation is like a complete farewell to the art film circle of the past, and has become a screw in the mainstream system of Hollywood. In addition to the Marvel Universe, Hurt's roles in other movies are also solidified settings, either a respected old man, or a bad old man with high respect and a deep sense of the city, as a necessary NPC role in commercial entertainment movies, Hurt's performance is of course easy, hand to hand, but this is obviously a sad tyrannical object.