Of his work that I’ve seen from this millennium-ouch-Steven Spielberg’s A.I. I’m sorry to say I have yet to see Hurt’s final Oscar-nominated performance, in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2005), which I naturally confuse with Wenders’s non-Hurt The End of Violence (1997). Until the End of the World (1991) was a typically quirky opus from Wim Wenders, whose The American Friend (1977) and Paris, Texas (1984) are both on my (long) short list it has the added attraction of newly composed and deliberately futuristic songs by, among others, my second-favorite band, Talking Heads (“Sax and Violins”), and my daughter’s favorite, U2 (the title tune). In fairness, the latter contains one of my favorite lines, when Albert Brooks says to Holly Hunter, “Okay, I’ll meet you at the place near the thing where we went that time,” a classic example of the “private language” between longtime friends or lovers that to this day we willfully misquote chez nous as “I’ll meet you at the place by the thing.” I have dim yet favorable memories of the thriller Gorky Park (1983), and especially of his Oscar-winning turn opposite Raul Julia in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), while if I was, as Dad used to say, “just whelmed” by Children of a Lesser God (1986) and Broadcast News (1987), it wasn’t due to any deficiency in his performances, both also nominated. The less said about Peter Yates’s Eyewitness (1981), the better, despite the presence of Hurt and BOF fave Sigourney Weaver interestingly, I considered Breaking Away (1979) overrated and actively disliked Four Friends (1981), both sans Hurt but also written by Steve Tesich. I still remember how powerful I found the Altered States trailer when I was working at Cinestudio back in my Trinity College days in Hartford. But he endeared himself to me from his very first film, Ken Russell’s 1980 adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky’s Altered States, one of my quintessential “love stories that’s not obviously a love story,” like James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989). There were occasions when I felt he was miscast-which is not the same thing as giving a bad performance-e.g., as Rochester in Jane Eyre (1996) or Duke Leto Atreides in the second of the seemingly endless versions of Dune (2000).

So I see, with great sadness, that William Hurt has died at the relatively young age of 71.

Lay Down Dead by Matthew Bradley