Kent Broadhurst, the character actor who appeared in films including The Verdict, Silkwood and Silver Bullet and wrote the screenplay that led to Laura Linney’s first Emmy Award, has died. He was 86.
Broadhurst died May 20 at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, according to a paid obituary. He lived for the past 63 years in a building on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village.
The St. Louis native did lots of theater work during his lengthy career, making it to Broadway in revivals of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial in 1983 and A Doll’s House in 1997, and he wrote many plays as well.
Broadhurst might be best known for playing the anguished father of the murdered best friend of Corey Haim’s Marty Coslaw in the Stephen King-scripted horror film Silver Bullet (1985).
In an interview for the DVD, he said he arrived at a park at about 2 a.m. for the scene in which his character is taken to his dead son. “The prop department had presented [director Dan Attias] with the corpse of the boy that was just embarrassing, it was unusable,” he recalled. “It looked like a window mannequin that had been smashed with a hammer and smeared with cranberry juice.
