Timothy Hutton

After 19-year-old Timothy Hutton won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in the powerful family drama Ordinary People (1980), he spent the rest of the decade and most of the '90s playing sensitive characters in offbeat, intellectually oriented films, though he also occasionally got to play villains. Hutton was primarily raised in Berkeley, CA, by his mother as she and his father, actor Jim Hutton, best known for playing Ellery Queen in the 1960s, divorced. Young Hutton gained early acting experience in high school and during a summer vacation, toured the country with his father in a road show production of Harvey. Hutton moved to Southern California to live with his dad and break into movies. During his early years, Hutton appeared in television movies such as And Baby Makes Six (1979) and the hard-hitting Friendly Fire (1979). Robert Redford's directorial debut, Ordinary People, was Hutton's feature-film debut. In part, the realism of Hutton's wrenching portrayal of the anguished teen who blames himself for his brother's death was fueled by his grief over his father's recent death from cancer. Hutton was the youngest actor to win in the Best Supporting Actor category. Despite his early promise, Hutton remains a well-respected but not terribly high-ranking star. In part it could be a backlash from Ordinary People, for Hutton was so good at playing the tormented young man that he was relegated to playing similarly troubled youths, though he also occasionally appeared in comedies, sci fi, and other genres. Roles in Taps (1981) and Turk 182 showed that, given the chance, Hutton could indeed expand the boundries of troubled youth niche to compelling results, and though his roles in the following decade weren't always in A-list features, Hutton did impress in such high profile releases as Q & A (1990), The Dark Half (1993), French Kiss (1995) and The General's Daughter (1999). As a general ruke Hutton would frequently avoid mainstream films in favor of smaller roles as deeper characters in such offbeat fare as City of Industry (1997) and Deterrence (1999), though the new millennuim did find him stepping back into the spotlight somewhat with the release of John Sayles' Sunshine State and the Steven King adaptation Secret Window - which found him cast opposite Hollywood heavyweight Johnny Depp. Of course having appeared in the acclaimed thriller The Dark Half this wasn't Hutton's first foray into the King's twisted universe, and in 2004 Hutton would continue to keep audiences' pulses pounding with a role as a college professor who discovers a record of his murder five days before it occurs in 5 Days to Midnight (2004).

by Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide