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Marlee Matlin and actor William Hurt arrive at the 1987 Academy Awards.
Frank Trapper/Corbis via Getty ImagesMarlee Matlin looks back on her troubled two-year relationship with the actor William hurt and what he called “a practice of abuse.”
Matlin, 59, met Hurt, and he died in 2022 aged 71while 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 came to grips with Oscar for Best Actressmaking her the first deaf actress ever to win the award.
Hunt was the presenter that night, and Matlin said she was scared to go up on stage and accept the Oscar.
“I was scared as I walked up the stairs to get the Oscar,” she recalls in Marlee Matlin: Not alone anymorea new documentary about her life that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this month. “I was scared 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,” he admitted. “I wish I had shown my joy. But I was afraid because he was standing there.”
Marlee Matlin and actor William Hurt
Bettmann/Getty ImagesThis is not the first time Matlin has spoken about that night. In Dave Kargerbook 2024, 50 Oscar NightMatlin recalled an exchange she had with Hurt, which had diminished her achievement.
“‘So there’s that little man with you. What makes you think you deserve it?’” he recalled 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 many years to get what you got with one movie.'”
The documentary also features Matlin’s sign language interpreter Jack Jasonwho reported an incident with the two on a private plane. He claimed that Matlin had been in a room with Hurt and left with a black eye.
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Children of a Lesser God a director Randa Haines remembers seeing alleged bruises on Matlin during the filming.
“I could see they were having an argument, a fight,” he claimed. “I remember noticing bruises once. But I didn’t know. Nobody felt they had a license to start a private relationship or comment on it or ask questions about it.”
Haines also talked about how Hurt “would tell a joke and turn his back to (Matlin) so he couldn’t see.”
“I tried to understand what was going on,” he added. “But I saw that she was suffering from it.”
Before his death, Hurt said he apologized to Matlin.
“My recollection is that we both apologized and both did a great deal to improve our lives,” he said in a statement to A! News in 2009. “Of course I did and I apologize for any pain I caused. And I know we’ve both grown. I wish Marlee and her family nothing but the best.”
