Actor William Hurt, star of 'Broadcast News' and 'Body Heat,' dies at 71

William Hurt, whose laconic charisma and self-assured subtlety as an actor made him one of the 1980s' foremost leading men in movies such as Broadcast News, Body Heat and The Big Chill, has died. He was 71.

Hurt's son, Will, said in a statement that Hurt died Sunday of natural causes. Hurt died peacefully, among family, his son said. The Hollywood Reporter said he died at his home in Portland, Oregon. Deadline first reported Hurt's death. Hurt was previously diagnosed with prostate cancer that had spread to the bone in 2018.

In a long-running career, Hurt was four times nominated for an Academy Award, winning for 1985's Kiss of the Spider Woman. After his breakthrough in 1980's Paddy Chayefsky-scripted Altered States as a psychopathologist studying schizophrenia and experimenting with sensory deprivation, Hurt quickly emerged as a mainstay of the '80s.

In Lawrence Kasdan's 1981 steamy neo noir Body Heat, Hurt starred alongside Kathleen Turner as a lawyer coaxed into murder. In 1983's The Big Chill, again with Kasdan, Hurt played the brooding Vietnam War veteran Nick Carlton, one of a group of college pals who gather for their friend's funeral.

Hurt, whose father worked for the State Department, was born in Washington, D.C., and traveled widely as a child while attending boarding school in Massachusetts. His parents divorced when he was young. When Hurt was 10, his mother married Henry Luce III, son of the Time magazine founder. Hurt studied acting at Julliard and first emerged on the New York stage with the Circle Repertory Company. After The Big Chill, he returned to the stage to star on Broadway in David Rabe's Hurlyburly, for which he was nominated for a Tony.

Shortly after came Kiss of the Spider Woman, which won Hurt the best actor Oscar for his performance as a gay prisoner in a repressive South American dictatorship. "I am very proud to be an actor," Hurt said, accepting the award.

In 1986's Children of a Lesser God, it was his co-star, Marlee Matlin, who took the Oscar for her performance as a custodian at a school for the deaf. Hurt played a speech teacher. For Hurt and Matlin, their romance was off-screen, as well — but it wasn't Hurt's first experience with his private life finding notoriety.

Hurt was first married to actor Mary Beth Hurt (also a Big Chill co-star) from 1971 to 1982. While he was married, he began a relationship with Sandra Jennings, whose pregnancy with their son precipitated Hurt's divorce from Mary Beth Hurt. A high-profile court case ensued six years later in which Jennings claimed.