Actor. Born on March 20, 1950, in Washington, D.C. Big, rangy (6'3"), blond star of the American stage and screen. He spent much of his early childhood in the South Pacific, mainly in Guam, where his father, a government official, was stationed on a State Department assignment. When he was six his parents divorced. He moved with his mother to Manhattan but continued to spend vacations with his father in such faraway places as the Sudan and Somaliland. He was 10 when his mother married Henry Luce III, heir to the Time-Life fortune. Bewildered by the sudden wealth and change in lifestyle, Hurt was sent off to the Middlesex prep school in Massachusetts, where he found some solace from alienation in school dramatics. Under the influence of his stepfather, he enrolled at Tufts University, majoring in theology. Again, he found himself drawn to the school's drama program, where, in his junior year, he met and married aspiring actress Mary Beth Hurt (nee Supinger). They moved to London, where he spent his senior year studying drama, then back, to New York, where he enrolled at the drama wing of Juilliard. Just before graduating, with his life at an impasse and his marriage on the rocks, he motorbiked cross-country to Ashland, Oregon, where he made his professional stage debut during a regional Shakespeare festival. His real career began in 1976, after he joined New York's Circle Repertory Company. A string of successes, capped by an Obie Award for "My Life" (1977) led to growing recognition and eventually to his auspicious screen debut in Ken Russell's Altered States (1980).
During the 80's Hurt developed into one of Hollywood's premier leading men, gaining audience popularity with his appealing screen presence and the growing approval of critics for his steadily maturing skills as an interpreter of complex roles. He won both the Academy Award and the Cannes Festival Best Actor awards for his exceptional portrayal of a homosexual prisoner in Hector Babenco's Kiss of a Spider Woman (1985). He was nominated for Oscars twice more in a row for Children of a Lesser God (1986) and Broadcast News (1987). Hurt was less successful in his personal affairs. After his 1982 divorce, he became involved with a ballet dancer Sandra Jennings who bore his child, Alex. In 1989, she sued the actor in a landmark "divorce" case, maintaining she was, in fact, his common-law wife. By the time of the suit, Hurt was married to Heidi Henderson, daughter of bandleader Skitch Henderson.
