William Hurt

In a long-running career, Hurt was nominated for an Academy Award three times, winning for 1985's Kiss of the Spider Woman.

He acted in numerous beloved and high-profile films, from Broadcast News to Tuck Everlasting. He played cerebral, conflicted patriarchs in Into the Wild and The Village, and made something of a late-career specialty in portraying professors, in movies such as A.I. Artifical Intelligence, Engdame and Marvel blockbusters such as The Incredible Hulk, where he found a new, younger audience as a military scientist who is the hero's nemesis. Playing a queer character imprisoned in Brazil along with a political activist, Hurt said in 2010 he made a point of thinking of his character as transgender, rather than gay. Later, Hurt would also be accused of physical abuse in a palimony lawsuit brought by dancer Sandra Jennings, the mother of one of his childre. "She was such a brilliant woman that she managed to work herself up from below the bottom rung of the Time Inc. ladder," Hurt said of his mother. On screen, Hurt could be genial or chilling, and sometimes both in the same film. Following a cosmopolitan childhood spent all over the world, Hurt attended a private boarding school in Massachusetts. His parents divorced and his mother remarried. Hurt studied theology at Tufts University before transferring to Julliard and making a name for himself in the New York theater scene. "He really is a woman. Hurt burst into movies seemingly as a fully formed leading man, and he came by his chiseled patrician demeanor honestly. He was twice divorced, from Mary Beth Hurt and from Heidi Henderson. He died peacefully, among family, of natural causes." He was born in Washington, D.C., to a father who worked in the U.S. diplomatic corps and a mother who'd become an executive of sorts for Time Inc. His parents, Hurt told WHYY's Fresh Air, met in China.