US Actor William Hurt Dies at Age 71
American actor William Hurt, known for much-loved films such as “The Big Chill” and “A History of Violence,” has died at age 71, US media reported Sunday.
Multiple outlets cited Hurt’s son, Will, who said in a statement: “It is with great sadness that the Hurt family mourns the passing of William Hurt, beloved father and Oscar winning actor, on March 13, 2022, one week before his 72nd birthday. He died peacefully, among family, of natural causes.”
The actor had been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer in May 2018, but his son’s statement did not specify whether the disease contributed to Hurt’s passing.
Hurt built his reputation on his willingness to play quirky and unusual characters such as a Russian police officer in “Gorky Park” (1983), a wealthy and aloof husband in Woody Allen’s “Alice” (1990) and a man seeking to build a machine that would benefit blind people in “Until the End of the World” (1991).
His first film role was as an obsessed scientist in Ken Russell’s 1980 film “Altered States.” Appearing opposite Kathleen Turner in “Body Heat” in 1981 turned him into a sex symbol, and he won the best actor Oscar in 1985 for playing a gay prisoner in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”
Hurt was also nominated for Oscars as a teacher of deaf students in “Children of a Lesser God” (1986) and as a slow-witted television anchorman in “Broadcast News” (1987).
For his second Academy Award, Hurt played a Philadelphia mobster in David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence.” He appears in the film for only about 10 minutes, but he made a huge impact with critics, who praised his “creepy” and “funny” character.
In recent years, Hurt made himself known to younger moviegoers through his turn in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Thaddeus Ross, a blustering general who was present on the day Bruce Banner became the Hulk.
In addition to “The Incredible Hulk,” Hurt’s character appeared in four Marvel films including “Captain America: Civil War,” “Avengers: Infinity War,” “Avengers: Endgame” and “Black Widow.”
Hurt was born March 20, 1950 in Washington, DC, but as his father was a U.S. diplomat, he traveled widely as a child.
After his parents divorced, his mother married Henry Luce III, the heir to the Time-Life empire, and moved to New York.
Hurt stayed close by, studying theology at Tufts University before enrolling at the renowned Juilliard School of performing arts in New York.
Despite his spreading fame, Hurt did not settle in Hollywood but set up his home in Oregon. In interviews, he had shown he was uneasy with stardom.
“I’m not comfortable with all this. I’m not comfortable with walking the red carpet in a tuxedo and seeing all the women with their boobs pushed up and all the men dressed as penguins,” he told one interviewer.
His private life, however, read like something straight out of Hollywood.
Hurt married aspiring actress Mary Beth Supinger after finishing his studies at Tufts and followed her to London to study drama. They divorced on their return to New York.
In the late 1980s, he was sued by a former live-in love, ballet dancer Sandra Jennings, who is the mother of one of his sons.
He had two other sons from another marriage and a daughter, Jeanne, from a relationship with French actress Sandrine Bonnaire.
Hurt spoke fluent French and was also an avid private pilot.
Source: Voice of America
Everyday Things Created by Black Inventors
From the three-light traffic signal, refrigerated trucks, automatic elevator doors, color monitors for desktop computers, to the shape of the modern ironing board, the clothes wringer, blood banks, laser treatment for cataracts, home security systems and the super-soaker children’s toy, many objects and services Americans use every day were invented by Black men and women.
These innovators were recognized for their inventions, but countless other inventors of color have gone largely unrecognized. Others are completely lost to history.
“There were some instances where Black inventors would compete with Alexander Graham Bell, with Thomas Edison, where their inventions were really just as good and just as transformative, but they just did not have access to the capital,” says Shontavia Johnson, an entrepreneur and associate vice president for entrepreneurship and innovation at Clemson University in South Carolina. “They did not have access to all these different systems that the United States puts in place to support inventors.”
Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the lightbulb, but it was Lewis Latimer, the son of formerly enslaved people, who patented a new filament that extended the lifespan of lightbulbs so they wouldn’t die out after a few days. Latimer got a patent for his invention in 1882, something countless Black innovators in the generations before him were unable to do.
Free Black citizens could obtain patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, but enslaved Black people could not. Slavery wasn’t abolished until 1865, with the adoption of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Prior to that, the inventions of Black innovators were often claimed by their enslavers or other white people.
Modern-day research suggests that was the case with the technology behind the cotton gin — a device that separated cotton seeds from their fibers. It was largely innovated by enslaved Black people, but a white man named Eli Whitney obtained the patent for the invention.
“We often count our country as being this place where innovation and entrepreneurship thrive,” Johnson says. “But when you completely exclude a group of people from access to the patent system, … exploiting their invention, then the natural result of that is, you look at the most important inventors and innovators in American history … and they pretty much are your stereotypical white male inventor, not because other people have not been innovative, too, it’s just these folks have been excluded from the patent system.”
This deliberate early exclusion of Black inventors from the patent system and, in large part, the pantheon of great American inventors, was rooted in racist assumptions about the intellectual inferiority of Black people, according to Rayvon Fouché, a professor of American studies at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana.
“Invention was seen as this God-given ability. So, as you can imagine, all the perceptions, ideas about masculinity, maleness, power [and] authority are all wrapped into this vision of inventiveness,” says Fouché, who also leads the National Science Foundation’s Social and Economic Sciences Division. “The inherent understanding of what an inventor is and was and could be — the framing of that term — eliminated the possibility for all Black folks and all marginalized people.”
Other barriers Black inventors historically faced included less access to equal education, systematic exclusion from professional scientific and engineering
societies, limited access to wealthy investors and mainstream banks for start-up capital to commercialize their inventions, and racial violence.
Black inventors were also less involved in patenting activity between 1870 and 1940, during times of lynchings, race riots and segregation laws in the United States.
There were also the Black creators who came up with innovations that didn’t necessarily fit the traditional ideas of inventiveness.
“For much of our history, when we think about the word ‘invention,’ it’s sort of freighted with these white, Eurocentric notions of what that means,” says Eric Hintz, a historian with the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “Often, the traditional definition of ‘invention’ is something like a machine that saves human labor or animal labor, that does some task more efficiently.”
That kept certain innovations by Black people from being recognized by the patent system.
“[The patent system] is built on this model that basically assumes innovation is desirable when it’s tied to commercial benefit. But if it is rooted in community survival or the needs of society, that is not worthy of protection, and we see that in the law,” Johnson says. “There are certain types of things that are patentable, and certain things that are not patentable, and that is a distinction that I do think leaves a lot of people out of the ecosystem.”
A New York DJ known as Grandmaster Flash pioneered the use of record turntables as an instrument by using his fingers to manipulate the sounds backward and forward or to slow it down. He had an innovative style of mixing records and blending beats that pioneered the art of deejaying, but he holds no patents.
“Black people have been doing lots of creative, innovative things,” Fouché says. “We can think about all kinds of technological creative things within the context of hip-hop and music production and art in other ways. But of course, the patent office is driven by techno-scientific innovation. And I think part of it is, for me, to open up the conversation of what inventiveness is and can be.”
Museum collections have historically excluded the contributions of marginalized people, a failing the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center readily acknowledges.
“Definitely the Smithsonian and other libraries and museums have been complicit over the decades, over the centuries, of privileging white inventors in the things that we collect,” says Hintz. “We have a ton of stuff on Edison and Tesla [electricity] and Steve Jobs [innovator of Apple products and devices] and whomever, but it’s incumbent on us now to make sure that we’re preserving the stories of Madam C.J. Walker, Grandmaster Flash, Lonnie Johnson — who invented the Super Soaker, of Patricia Bath, an ophthalmologist who invented a way of eradicating cataracts.”
Walker, America’s first self-made female millionaire, built her fortune with a line of hair care products for Black women. Black people also invented the clothes dryer, the automatic gear shift in vehicles, the modern toilet, lawn sprinkler, peanut butter and potato chips.
But the innovation gap persists. African Americans and women still participate at each stage of the innovation process at lower rates than their male and white counterparts.
“How do you get more Black kids, girls [and] marginalized people into these pathways that have been traditionally white, middle class and male?” Fouché says, emphasizing the importance of sparking children’s imaginations, despite any obstacles.
“I’m more interested in saying, ‘Well, what do you want to do? How do you want to change the world? What are the things that are meaningful to you?’ and just impressing upon people the limitless opportunities. … So, don’t limit the possibilities.”
Source: Voice of America