Marlee Matlin and actor William Hurt arrive at the 1987 Academy Awards. Frank Trapper/Corbis via Getty Images
Marlee Matlin is looking back on her turbulent two-year relationship with actor William Hurt and what she called his “habit of abuse.”
Matlin, 59, met Hurt, who died in 2022 at age 71, while filming 1986’s Children of a Lesser God. She portrayed Sarah, a deaf woman who falls in love with her speech teacher, James (Hunt). The role landed her an Oscar for Best Actress, making her the first deaf actress to ever win the award.
Hunt was the one presenting that night, and Matlin said she was scared to go up on stage and accept the Oscar.
“I was afraid as I walked up the stairs to get the Oscar,” she recalls in Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, a new documentary about her life that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this month. “I was afraid because I knew in my gut that he wasn’t happy. Because I saw the look on his face, and my thought was, ‘s—!’”
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Matlin described approaching the stage and hesitating, afraid to take the award from her boyfriend’s hands.
“I wish it were different,” she admitted. “I wish I had shown my joy. But I was afraid because he was standing right there.”
Marlee Matlin and actor William Hurt Bettmann/Getty Images
This isn’t the first time Matlin has spoken about that night. In Dave Karger’s 2024 book, 50 Oscar Nights, Matlin recalled an exchange she had with Hurt, who minimized her achievement.
“‘So you have that little man there next to you. What makes you think you deserve it?’” she remembered him saying. “I looked at him like, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘A lot of people work a long time, especially the ones you were nominated with, for a lot of years to get what you got with one film.’”
The documentary also features Matlin’s sign language interpreter Jack Jason, who recounted an incident with the two on a private plane. Matlin, he claimed, had been in a room with Hurt and exited with a black eye.
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Children of a Lesser God director Randa Haines recalls seeing alleged bruises on Matlin during filming.
“I could see that they were having arguments, fights,” she claimed. “I remember once noticing a bruise. But I didn’t know. Nobody felt that they had license to enter into a private relationship or comment on it or ask questions about it.”
Haines also spoke about how Hurt “would tell a joke and turn his back to [Matlin] so that she couldn’t see.”
“I tried to understand what was going on,” she added. “But I saw that she was suffering from it.”
Before his death, Hurt said that he had apologized to Matlin.
“My own recollection is that we both apologized and both did a great deal to heal our lives,” he said in a statement to E! News in 2009. “Of course, I did and do apologize for any pain I caused. And I know we have both grown. I wish Marlee and her family nothing but good.”