Despite being happily married since 1993, Marlee Matlin is now looking back at a darker period in her life.
A new documentary about the 59-year-old actress includes details about her relationship with William Hurt, her co-star in the 1986 movie “Children of a Lesser God.”
In the new doc “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Thursday, Matlin said there was “a habit of abuse” with her then-boyfriend.
Hurt, who died in 2022 at age 71, was 35, and the actress was 19 when the two were cast in the project, which marked Matlin’s first feature film debut.
The movie was a screen adaptation of the Mark Medoff play about a deaf woman’s romantic relationship with a hearing speech teacher. When the “Dead Silence” star won the Oscar for best actress at the 1987 Academy Awards, “The Miracle Season” actor presented her with the trophy.
“I was afraid as I walked up the stairs to get the Oscar,” Matlin recalled about the moment in an interview with filmmaker Shoshannah 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–t!’”
Hurt was also nominated for “Children of a Lesser God” but did not win, with Matlin previously admitting that he reacted coldly when they were alone later that night.
Hurt had won the best actor Oscar the year before for his role in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”
In Dave Karger’s book “50 Oscar Nights,” Matlin revealed what Hurt told her that night: “’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.’”
Matlin explained that after kissing Hurt onstage and approaching the podium, she “didn’t take the Oscar from him right away” out of fear.
She added, “I wish it were different. I wish I had shown my joy. But I was afraid because he was standing right there.”
Matlin’s Oscar win made her the youngest and only deaf winner in the best actress category’s history.
In the documentary, Matlin’s sign language interpreter, Jack Jason, detailed an alleged incident on a private plane, where the “Dancing with the Stars” vet reportedly emerged with a black eye after being in a room with Hurt.
“Children of a Lesser God” director, Randa Haines, also recalled seeing bruises on Matlin’s skin while directing the couple in the ’80s.
“I could see that they were having arguments, fights,” she said. “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, shared other tactics she witnessed from Hurt. He “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.”
Matlin had some of her own theories of why Hurt behaved the way he did. The “CODA” star expressed that the late actor was “threatened by my youth” and overnight success.
She does, however, give 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 all of the cocaine and marijuana she had in her NYC apartment, Matlin checked herself into the Betty Ford Center and paid for her own interpreter at the clinic as the rehab’s first deaf patient.
Matlin went on to meet her now-husband Kevin Grandalski while filming the series “Reasonable Doubts” in the early 1990s. The two tied the knot in 1993 and welcomed four kids: Sara, Brandon, Tyler and Isabelle.
In 2022, the “Switched at Birth” alum shared with Extra about how she and Grandalski embrace each of their children’s differences.
“I’m a mom of four and I know full well my kids as they’ve grown up that they’ve had their dreams,” said Matlin. “It’s interesting to watch kids, what it is they want to choose, what path they wanted to go on, how they want to deal with everything in their lives, the choices that they make, so I get it and I chased my dreams.”
