Marlee Matlin and actor William Hurt arrive at the 1987 Academy Awards.
Frank Trapper/Corbis via Getty ImagesMarlee Matlin looks back on her tumultuous two-year relationship with the actor William Hurt and what he called his “habit of torture.”
Matlin, 59, met Hurt, who died in 2022 at the age of 71, while filming in 1986. Children of the Little God. He portrayed Sarah, a deaf woman who falls in love with her speech teacher, James (Hunt). This role earned her an Oscar for Best Actress, making her the first deaf actress to win the award.
Hunt was the quiet one that night, and Matlin said she was afraid to go up on stage and accept the Oscar.
“I was scared when I went up the stairs to get Oscar,” he remembers entering Marlee Matlin: She’s not alone anymorea new documentary about his life premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this month. “I was afraid because I knew he was not happy. Because I saw the look on his face, and my thought was, ‘I—!’”
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Matlin explained that approaching the stage he hesitated, afraid to take the medal from the hands of his boyfriend.
“I wish it was different,” he admitted. “I wish I could have shown my happiness. But I was afraid because he was standing right there.”
Marlee Matlin and actor William Hurt
Bettmann/Getty ImagesIt’s not the first time Matlin has spoken out that night. In Dave Karger2024 book, 50 Oscar NightsMatlin recalls an exchange he had with Hurt, who downplayed his success.
“’So you have that young man next to you. What makes you think you deserve it?’” she remembered him saying. “I looked at him and said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘A lot of people work for a long time, especially the nominees, for years to get what you get in one movie.'”
The documentary also features Matlin’s sign language interpreter Jack Jasonwho narrated the incident with the two on a private plane. Matlin, he said, was in the room with Hurt and came out with a black eye.
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Children of the Little God director Randa Haines recalls seeing bruises allegedly on Matlin during filming.
“I could see that they were arguing, arguing,” he said. “I remember one time seeing bruises. But I didn’t know. No one felt they had a license to enter into private relationships or comment on them or ask questions about them.”
Haines also talked about how Hurt would “tell a joke and then turn away [Matlin] so that he does not see.
“I tried to understand what was happening,” he added. “But I saw that he was suffering from it.”
Before his death, Hurt said he apologized to Matlin.
“What I remember is that we both apologized and we both did a lot to fix our lives,” he said in a statement. E! News in 2009. “Yes, I apologized and apologized for any pain I caused. And I know we’ve both grown up. I wish Marlee and her family the best.”