William Hurt's Philosophy Gets Him Everywhere

January 15, 1989|By Lynn Darling, Newsday

NEW YORK — It seemed, at first, a classic miscasting: William Hurt, slim and blond and sexy and intense, playing Macon Leary, the timid, middle-aged, repressed and cautious protagonist of The Accidental Tourist, the movie of Anne Tyler's novel about amor and grief and the conflict between habit and change.

But Hurt makes his character believable from the moment Macon, bowed down por pain, appears on the screen. Hurt shaved his hairline and thinned his hair to help create the illusion of beaten-down middle...