RIP, William Hurt.
William Hurt was the first serious actor I ever really loved. In the summer of 1990 I saw a movie called the Accidental Tourist, starring William Hurt and Geena Davis. That movie was a real watershed for me, propelling me out of my passive adolescent media consumption and into the active appreciation of film as a serious and genuine interest.
And the first thing I did was find every William Hurt movie I could.
He'd only been making movies for 10 years at that point but what a decade! Kiss of the Spider Woman! The Big Chill! Body Heat! Gorky Park! Children of a Lesser God! Broadcast News! For a kid like me, scrawny and lonely, raised in a tiny podunk town before the internet, hungry for more than network sitcoms and blandly pleasant made-for-TV movies, Hurt's filmography was like cold water at the edge of a desert, or the perfect steak after a long fast, or like settling into bed at the end of a long hard day.
By the time that summer was over, I'd discovered Kurosawa, Bergman, Ozu, Herzog and others. I had learned to love the silent majesty of Nosferatu and Metropolis and watched all of the Chaplin, Lloyd, and Keaton I could find. I had gasped out loud at the final horrible revelation of Rosebud.
I was crushed when Ilsa got on that plane, crushed to learn that sometimes the problems of three little really people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy mixed up world. I watched Amadeus four times in a single day, unable to get my fill of F.Murray Abraham's pained, wounded smile. And one night, over a single life-changing 12 hour period, I watched Apocalypse Now, the Deer Hunter, Platoon, Hamburger Hill and Full Metal Jacket.
And since then, of course, I've gone both farther and deeper into every dark crevice of cinema I could find.
But before all that, way back at the very beginning, there was just that 15 year-old kid staring at his TV. He watches a man in a taxi in Paris who thinks he's lost everything. Unexpectedly, he sees the woman he just realized he loves and who he thought he lost forever (Geena Davis). He tells the driver to stop. She looks up and sees him. How will she react? Her face breaks into laughter. She's overjoyed. He hasn't lost her! The camera pulls focus through the windshield on the man in the backseat....
...and for the first time since the movie started, William Hurt smiles. And in the dark, in the dead of night, that 15 year old kid bursts into happy tears. Not just for the man, or the story, but for the realization that the world could possibly contain something this delicate and this beautiful, and for himself that he was lucky enough to find it and know it for what it was.
When I was 15, William Hurt smiled at me through a TV screen. And I was never the same.
Rest in Peace, Mr.Hurt. May you walk the boards forever in eternity. May all your audiences be kind and all your ovations, standing.
This message was last edited by the user at 18:49, Thu 17 Mar 2022.
