Marlee Matlin Details Ex-Boyfriend William Hurt's 'Habit of Abuse' in New Documentary: 'I Was Afraid'

A new documentary about Marlee Matlin’s life includes details about her difficult relationship with William Hurt, her costar in the 1986 film Children of a Lesser God.

Matlin, 59, recalls “a habit of abuse” with her then boyfriend in director Shoshannah Stern’s revealing documentary Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Thursday, Jan. 23.

Hurt, who died in 2022 at age 71, was 35 and Matlin was 19 when she was cast in her feature film debut, a screen adaptation of the hit Mark Medoff play about a deaf woman's romantic relationship with a hearing speech teacher. Hurt presented her with the Academy Award for best actress at the 1987 Oscar ceremony, a moment Matlin sheds further light on in the documentary.

“I was afraid as I walked up the stairs to get the Oscar,” she recalls in an on-camera interview with Stern. “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 has previously revealed that Hurt, who was also nominated for Children of a Lesser God but did not win, reacted coldly when they were alone later that night. (Hurt had won the best actor Oscar the year before for Kiss of the Spider Woman.)

In Dave Karger’s book 50 Oscar Nights, she recalls what Hurt told her. “ 'So you have that little man there next to you. What makes you think you deserve it?' 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.' "

Not Alone Anymore replays Matlin’s Oscar-winning moment (which made her the youngest and only deaf winner in the best actress category’s history) after stories of Hurt’s physical abuse from her sign-language interpreter Jack Jason and Children of a Lesser God director Randa Haines. Matlin explains that after kissing Hurt onstage and approaching the podium she “didn’t take the Oscar from him right away” out of fear. “I wish it were different. I wish I had shown my joy. But I was afraid because he was standing right there.”

In his on-camera interview, Jason details an incident on a private plane in which Matlin emerged from a room with Hurt with a black eye. Haines recalls seeing bruises on Matlin’s skin while directing the couple in Children of a Lesser God.

“I could see that they were having arguments, fights,” she says in her interview. “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, 79, also remembers 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. But I saw that she was suffering from it.”

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Although Matlin says Hurt was “threatened by my youth” and overnight success in the doc, she also now gives him “an ounce of credit” for “saving me in terms of my drug use. He went to rehab, and I was able to see what it did for him, and I knew that checking in there would do me great.”

After using up every bit of cocaine and marijuana she had in her New York apartment, Matlin added, she checked herself into the Betty Ford Center, paying for her own interpreter as the rehabilitation clinic’s first deaf patient.

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Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore chronicles the inroads Matlin made for the deaf community in the years following her historic Oscar win. After her 2021 film CODA won three Academy Awards — including best picture and best supporting actor for Troy Kotsur, a deaf actor — Matlin said in a speech that she was now “not alone anymore” as the only deaf Oscar-winning actor.

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