A tall, sensitive leading man since the 1980s, Enough has proven a versatile, pensive actor who has selected his roles wisely. Most often playing coolly intelligent, remote and sometimes physically or spiritually damaged characters, Hurt has had a contentious relationship with Hollywood and, for that matter, with his own stardom. In some circles he has developed a reputation for temperament both on and off the set, but, besides being choosy and often admirably offbeat in his selection of material, Hurt is foremost an actor intensely committed to his roles, his craft and to a script -- an actor who, even if the results sometimes suggest otherwise, dislikes the notion of making agreeable but bland pabulum for the masses.
After extensive stage work with regional theater in Oregon and with the Circle Repertory Company and the New York Shakespeare Festival in NYC, Hurt made his film debut as a scientist who experiments on himself to terrifying effect in Ken Russell's "Altered States" (1980). He confirmed his status as a movie star when he co-starred as the cocky and sexy but foolish lawyer opposite Kathleen Turner in Lawrence Kasdan's steamy film noir suspenser, "Body Heat" (1981) and followed up as a psychologically maimed Vietnam vet in Kasdan's "The Big Chill" (1983).
A decided change of pace came first with Hurt's role as a Russian detective in "Gorky Park" (1983) and especially with his performance as the flamboyantly gay window dresser incarcerated in a Latin American jail in Hector Babenco's "Kiss of the Spider Woman" (1985). The latter earned him numerous plaudits, including an Oscar and Best Actor awards from the British Academy and the Cannes Film Festival. He had reached a peak of critical acclaim, and was a popular enough star to provide box-office insurance for "Children of a Lesser God" (1986), based on the Broadway success, with Hurt as a teacher of the hearing-impaired. He earned a second Best Actor Oscar nomination, and the following year made it three in a row with an amusing change-of-pace role as a dense newscaster in "Broadcast News" (1987).
Hurt's reticent persona meshed perfectly that of the emotionally withdrawn, reluctant travel writer in Kasdan's adaptation of the Anne Tyler bestseller, "The Accidental Tourist" (1988). It also suited his impersonal physician whose illness humanizes him in "The Doctor" (1991), a film which reteamed him with "Children" director Randa Haines. "The Doctor" marked Hurt's last box-office success for a while, and some saw his supporting turns as an adulterous college professor in "Mr. Wonderful" (1993) and as a corrupt cop in "Trial by Jury" (1994) as evidence of a decline into a character actor. But Hurt has long been the type who might call himself a character actor rather than a movie star; his role in "The Big Chill" was considerably smaller than those of several of his co-stars, and he also played an amusing smaller role as an inept hired killer in Kasdan's "I Love You to Death" (1990). He has, meanwhile, also played leads as the mysterious possessor of a sight-giving device in Wim Wenders' ambitious and somewhat underrated "Until the End of the World" (1991), as a potential adoptive father in "Second Sight" (1994) and as a Brooklyn writer in Wayne Wang's "Smoke" (1995).
As middle age set in, Hurt retained a sinewy physique but his blond mane was thinning and his looks were hardening. Nevertheless, he continued to bring his unique intelligence to a variety of roles. Hurt cut an idiosyncratic figure as Rochester in the 1996 remake of "Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre" while in Nora Ephron's "Michael" (also 1996), he delivered a strong portrait of a cynical tabloid reporter investigating the supposed visitation by an angel. The little seen gem "Loved" (1997) teamed him with Robin Wright Penn as a district attorney and a potential witness respectively. Hurt returned to the world of science fiction with his next two features, the muddled "Dark City", in which he played a police investigator looking into a possible murder, and the highly-anticipated feature version of "Lost in Space" (both 1998). Hurt rounded out 1998 with a stand-out performance as an impotent lawyer whose wife takes a lover in order to have a child in "The Proposition" and as the stoic husband of a dying woman (Meryl Streep) in "One True Thing".
With the dawning of the new millennium, the actor has continued to accept challenging parts whether they be supporting roles like his staunch Communist in Istvan Szabo's epic "Sunshine" or as the doomed patriarch of House Atreides in the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries "Frank Herbert's Dune" (both 2000) or leads in fare like the direct-to-cable "Contaminated Man" (also 2000). And Hurt continued to appear on the big screen, segueing from leading man roles to pivotal character parts, such as the desperate, obsessive Prof. Hobby in the Spielberg-Kubrick sci-fi fable "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence" (2001), Samuel L. Jackson's compassionate Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor in "Changing Lanes" (2002) and Angus, the father of Winnie Foster (Alexis Bledel), in the Disney adaptation of the children's classic novel "Tuck Everlasting."
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