A nice article about Bill...
It's been 3 weeks today since Bill passed. I'm still absolutely crushed by it as I really adored him. I came across this nice article about him a few minutes ago. It was good to read something warm and heartfelt about him. If anyone's interested, here it is.
Memories of William Hurt, actor of stage and film — and my babysittercont'd share
By CHRISTOPHER ARNOTT
HARTFORD COURANT
MAR 17, 2022 AT 10:50 AM
William Hurt was my favorite babysitter.
A dozen years before his film career kicked off spectacularly with “Altered States” — followed in short order by “Body Heat,” “The Big Chill,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (for which he won an Oscar”) and “Broadcast News” — the guy my family knew as Bill was an actor in a summer stock theater my parents were part owners of in central Michigan.
At the Ledges Playhouse, as at hundreds of similar theaters around the country in those days, one play was rehearsed in the morning and another in the afternoon while a third was playing to paying audiences in the evening. Bill Hurt was there for a couple of seasons, a few years apart. Among his roles was one of the sons (I wish I could remember which) in “Death of a Salesman.”
When William Hurt died earlier this week at the age of 71, memories came flooding back.
The family story is that Bill was sitting for me once and said: “Let’s play Cowboys and Indians. You be the Indian, and I’ll take your land.” He was the kind of young adult who treated kids as real people. I have memories of him including me in games, explaining things to me, having real conversations.
I’m amused that my image of William Hurt is wildly at odds with the short-haired, idealistic or world-weary man in a business suit he played so many times in the movies. I knew him as a hippie with hair down to his shoulders, who always wore love beads, a fringe jacket and John Lennon-style glasses. “The Big Chill” was a bit of a mindblower for me. The sorts of the things the old college pal characters reminisce about in that movie were things I’d seen Bill Hurt do in real life. I’d seen him in many a touch football game, at local pizza joints and in the big sprawling house the acting company shared in Grand Ledge, where the playhouse was.
The playhouse, a big old barn in the classic Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland “Let’s put on a show” mold, was my childhood playground. My older sister and I shared the stage with the actors when children were required in a play. The actors were our main playmates. I was around 8 years old, and Bill was a decade older.
The Ledges Playhouse is where William Hurt met his first wife, Mary Beth Supinger, who as Mary Beth Hurt became a celebrated stage and film actor herself. Mary Beth was my other favorite babysitter, and I remember how thrilled I was to hear she and Bill had gotten married. They later got divorced, and I, in my late teens then, had that twinge young innocents have when the world doesn’t work out the way you hoped it would.
Years later there were accusations in various memoirs and interviews that Bill had been abusive in some of his relationships. As a child, I would have been protected from such talk, and when I was older I was appalled.
Bill and Mary Beth bridged a major transition in my childhood: My father had been teaching at the University of Iowa, where Mary Beth was a student, and in 1969 we moved to Boston so he could teach at Tufts University, where Bill was a student and where we continued to see him grow as an actor.
At Tufts, I saw Bill Hurt as Demetrius in a mesmerizing production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which I’ve learned over the last few days on Facebook was deeply remembered by just about anyone who saw it or had anything to do with it. Directed by Tony Cornish, it was a phantasmagorical dreamscape of swirling lights and evanescent costumes that suited the post-”Hair” flower power era. Bill wore bright green tights and, bathed in warm shadows, was stripped naked by fairies at the end of the play.
In late 1990, around 20 years after he’d last babysat for me, I reconnected with Bill while he was in New Haven at the Yale Repertory Theatre, starring in the Chekhov drama “Ivanov.” I was running a bookstore about a block from the theater. I sent a note round to see if he remembered me, and he stopped by just hours later, and he kept visiting after nearly every performance. He had me order him aviation magazines because he enjoyed flying planes on his days off. It became a running joke around the shop: “William Hurt was looking for you.”
Being a bookshop across a street from the hotel and apartments where both the Yale Rep and the Long Wharf Theatre housed many of its actors, we were used to celebrities stopping in. We sold paperbacks and newspapers to the likes of James Earl Jones, Charles Nelson Reilly, Tammy Grimes and my favorite, the divine performance artist Ethyl Eichelberger, who would hide behind bookcases to surprise me. Bill Hurt seemed different. He was never on show.