Remembering William Hurt: An Actor Who Looked Like a Stoic He-Man but Wore His Feelings on the Outside

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticWilliam Hurt, who died Sunday at 71, had a look and an aura that appeared, at first, to fit all too snugly into Hollywood’s conception of what a movie star should be.

Tall and broad-shouldered, with a silky shock of wheat-colored hair, his handsome features set off by a cleft chin and a faraway gaze, he was, at a glance, the quintessence of the old-fashioned WASP he-man ideal. (In hindsight, he looked like a blond Jon Hamm.) In movies, this sort of fellow was generally presented as a paragon of rectitude, a “strong silent type.” But there was nothing silent about William Hurt.

The first time audiences encountered him, he was floating in a sensory-deprivation tank in the loony-tunes acid-head psychodrama “Altered States” (1980), and the moment he climbed out of that tank, suffused with the visions he had seen, he couldn’t stop jabbering about them. “Altered States” had a notorious backstory that translated onscreen in a special way.

The director, the flamboyant British stylish Ken Russell (“The Music Lovers”), and the screenwriter, the virtuoso of American verbosity Paddy Chayefsky (“Network”), were temperamental opposites who couldn’t stand each other.