A tall, blond, blue-eyed all-American type born into Washington D.C. corporate and political prestige, Hurt arrived on screen following a decade dominated by white ethnic, Method-driven male actors who pledged fealty to Lee Strasberg (De Niro, Pacino, Hoffman, etc.) It’s tempting to claim that his Gentile looks could have only flourished in the shadow of Reagan’s America, but Hurt’s classical appearance was always in productive tension with a sensitive, decidedly non-macho persona. His success as a romantic lead was predicated on a potent mix of carnality and soft compassion. Hurt specialized in playing the bold young man who would say things like, “I want to make love to you” to his female co-stars and mean it, imbuing a rank cliché with truth.

Granted, his carnality certainly remains fixed in the cultural memory. Under even slightly different circumstances, the brazenly aggressive flirting of Hurt’s himbo lawyer in Body Heat (1981) when he first meets Kathleen Turner’s femme fatale on the street would today be considered harassment. When they finally consummate their illicit affair, he flings a chair through her enormous, gaudy glass house just to get to her body. The film propelled Hurt to stardom partly based upon the resonant image of his and Turner’s sweaty, naked bodies tangled together like brambles. But as much as his performance depends on his physicality, it also teases out a heady contradiction between intrepid sexual confidence and love-blind gullibility. Much of the film’s tragedy lies in Hurt’s slow realization that he’s being manipulated by his paramour; he communicates this dawning awareness through his eyes, which start out agile and passionate but slowly become paranoid through heat exhaustion and logistical headaches.

Hurt had established his on-screen sexual magnetism while still in his twenties with his feature debut, Ken Russell’s sci-fi horror film Altered States (1980), which similarly depends on his vulnerable figure—either in an isolation tank while regressing into the consciousness of a caveman, or tripping on Mexican psychedelics in a remote cave—and the physical chemistry between him and co-star Blair Brown. His next major role, Peter Yates’s Eyewitness (1981), mostly concerns itself with an abstruse plot involving a murder committed in the name of persecuted Jews from the Soviet Union, but the film is grounded in Hurt’s single-minded infatuation with Sigourney Weaver. Him a janitor and Vietnam vet, her a news reporter from a wealthy family whom he aggressively pursues despite their class differences, managing to infuse innuendo into even an instruction in floor buffing. “I promise you, it will be wonderful,” he later tells her before they sleep together. 

Five years later, Hurt’s turn in Children of a Lesser God (1986) emphasizes the borderline-saintly aspect of his personality. His role as an energetic hearing speech teacher who encourages his deaf students to vocalize via pop music and profanity falls squarely within a tired tradition of on-screen educators who “shake up the system” with unconventional methods. The scenes between him and the kids are fairly banal, but Hurt flexes his tenderness and patience in his scenes with Marlee Matlin, whose hard-nosed exterior as a deaf custodian predictably melts away when in his arms. Their inevitable conflict stems from intra-deaf politics regarding assimilating into able-bodied society, but their differing ideologies mostly conceals standard relationship strife—she thinks he’s suffocating her identity, he thinks she’s pulling away from him. (Surprise: they’re both right!)

Matlin’s stories about their real-life relationship history clashed with the benevolent image of Hurt in his heyday, with her accounts of their three-year union including sexual assault and countless bouts of violence. (Following a somewhat stormy sex scene in Children of a Lesser God, Matlin sports visible bruises on her legs, which she says were from a fresh incident with Hurt.) Her 2009 memoir paints a portrait of a drunken serial abuser who had a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde split to his personality, whereas onscreen Hurt comes alive playing a person whose emotions are unguarded, both in and outside the bedroom.