William Hurt

William Hurt died yesterday. A great leading man in the '80s, by the late '90s he'd established himself in a solid career of great supporting performances. Suddenly William Hurt would turn up in a movie and he'd either elevate or perfectly complement the material.

I haven't seen most of his famous leading roles. I only recently saw Body Heat, a neo-noir from 1981, the year he became a big name. In that movie he has to be vulgar and sophisticated, carnal and canny, and he pulls it off. It's this mix of inviting warmth and selfish sensuality that made him so effective, that made him so good in small roles. Because he needed hardly any time to get the ball rolling.

I remember how stunned everyone was when he turned up as a mob boss in David Cronenberg's History of Violence in 2005. Everyone had somehow gotten used to him in softball, romantic leads. Suddenly that carnality from the '80s was working for him to make an effectively frightening gangster.

And then there are plenty of roles that weren't so much talked about but were crucial to making their films what they are. The father figure and robotics engineer in Spielberg's A.I., Thaddeus Ross in the MCU, and the real life knight, Sir William Marshal, in Ridley Scott's Robin Hood. He was one of the few things I liked about that movie.

Last year I also listened to him read me Ernest Hemmingway's The Sun Also Rises in audiobook. That mix of earnest empathy and indulgent vulgarity made him perfect for a young Hemmingway. There was certainly no other actor quite like him.