William Hurt. For cinemagoers of a certain age, the name conjures up the brighter memories of an era. No actor had a classier time of it in the 1980s. If a complex human drama managed to muscle its way past Schwarzenegger and Stallone up onto the big screen, Hurt was most likely the male lead. Ramrod-tall, blue-eyed and aquiline, with a high forehead swept clear of thin, fair hair, he even looked clever, like a tweedy young professor of letters on secondment to Hollywood.

A reminder. Those years in the sun began promptly in 1980, with Ken Russell’s Altered States, in which he plays a professor whose experiments with hallucinogens go wildly awry; continued with the steamy noir thriller Body Heat (1981), with Kathleen Turner; then steered him into ensemble comedy in The Big Chill and Soviet sleuthing in Gorky Park (both 1983). Hurt won an Oscar for the prison drama Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), as did his deaf co-star — and girlfriend — Marlee Matlin for Children of a Lesser God (1986). Broadcast News (1987), where he’s a slick television news reporter, and The Accidental Tourist (1988), in which he plays a lost soul who has recently lost his son and his marriage, completed this, in retrospect, astonishing run.

But then that, in terms of lead roles in films that people wanted to see, was that. At 38, Hurt had somehow contrived to match the career longevity of a pretty young actress. He did plough on, but suddenly the work seemed, as the title of the low-budget British film about fostering he made with Chris Menges in 1994 has it, Second Best. That decade saw him doing sci-fi, slapstick, romantic comedy, none of them genres that agreed with the cool intensity of his Nordic demeanour.

Not that Hurt sees it that way. “People would say, ‘Well, where’d you go?” I’d say, ‘I was there.’ It’s funny, because if you don’t give people what they expect, they think you’re failing. What if you know you’ve just done great work and you’re the only one that thinks so? You’re going to believe them? Or you’re going to go with what you know?” He might conceivably say that of his role in Istvan Szabo’s Sunshine. But Lost in Space?

Something undoubtedly happened, and it may not be divisible from the bad headlines crowding around Hurt, which resurfaced only last month when contents of Matlin’s new memoir were aired. Their two-year relationship, she revealed, involved drug abuse and physical abuse. “My own recollection,” he said in a statement, “is that we both apologised.” In 1989, he was also involved in a highly public alimony case in which the lawyer for his former partner, Sandra Jennings, railing against a ruling that the couple had never been legally married, accused the female judge of being in love with Hurt. An understandable predilection: at the time, a lot of filmgoers were.

If producers got jumpy about Hurt’s press, it may also be that the industry stopped making the kind of films that suited his performing style. There was a touch of Cary Grant about Hurt, a besuited civility. In the 1990s, the buttock-bearing leads went to the more animal Michael Douglas.

Even so, pedigree will out. Since 2005, Hurt has been eye-catchingly cast by David Cronenberg in A History of Violence, by Robert De Niro in The Good Shepherd and by Sean Penn in Into the Wild. Julie Delpy has him coming up in her latest, The Countess. Note that three of those directors are really actors. He has also been a sinisterly enigmatic presence as a conflicted scientist in the thriller series Damages, currently mid-run on BBC1.

Yet it is Endgame, a compelling new Channel 4 drama written by Paula Milne, that finally finds Hurt in a lead role, doing what he really does best. In an account of the secret negotiations at a country house in Somerset that preceded the freeing of Nelson Mandela, Hurt plays Willie Esterhuyse, a professor of philosophy at Stellenbosch University who is apartheid’s intellectual fig leaf. Around the table with him are Chiwetel Ejiofor as Thabo Mbeki, the ANC man who went on to become president of South Africa, and Jonny Lee Miller as Michael Young, the businessman who set up the negotiations with the collusion of his boss at Consolidated Gold Fields, Rudolph Agnew (Derek Jacobi), billing them as “research and development” to disguise them from the shareholders. Over in Robben Island, Mandela (Clarke Peters) waits.

There’s less hair, more midriff and a clipped Afrikaner accent, but the hallmarks of Hurt’s finest performances are there: the moral intelligence, that almost physical air of watchfulness, the careful delineation of speech and gesture. Even if he insists he's never been away, it’s good to have him back.

Of course Hurt being Hurt, he had to rip himself apart before he took the role. “I’m torn about docudrama,” he says. “I don’t personally buy into that nonsense about ‘we can feel more because it’s based on a true story’. What’s true? All history is interpretation. But I do think there is a point in making this project, and I searched for it. Mandela is obviously very much one of my heroes. The time was extremely important to me personally. I was turning 40.” (He has just turned 59.)

You need only sit in a pub with Hurt for an evening to get an inkling of how and why the scripts stopped coming his way. He is a man of opinions, intense, firebrand, nose-thumbing, bird-flipping opinions on just about everything, but principally on the evils of the Hollywood machine. He makes for terrific company, just so long as you don’t have to work with him.

From the way he tells the story of how he got involved in Altered States, it would have been clear from the start that he was from the awkward squad. He was three years out of the Juilliard drama school, where he drank in the Stanislavskian philosophy that acting is “pick and shovel work”, as he calls it. “I was doing ensemble repertory work. I was happy.” He had already decided he would not make films. “I really knew it was not for me. I do believe that women need nine months and I need six weeks.” Then, one day, on the way to an audition, he met a producer who told him about a script based on a novel by Paddy Chayefsky, whose recent films included The Hospital and Network. “I only knew one person in the film world I respected. Paddy Chayefsky owned his own work. No writer owns his own work. The first thing they did to disenfranchise all artists was to buy the writer’s work.”

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