[citation needed] "A lot of people think that because my father was an actor, I come from this big show-business background," Hutton told Bruce Cook of American Film magazine in 1981.

[5] Timothy Hutton's career began with parts in several television movies, most notably the 1979 ABC TV film Friendly Fire.

For his first feature film performance, as Conrad Jarrett in Ordinary People (1980), Hutton won both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor.

[citation needed] Hutton's next feature film, Taps (with George C. Scott, Sean Penn, and Tom Cruise), was popular with critics and audiences, but during the next several years, his motion pictures, such as Iceman, Daniel, Turk 182, Made in Heaven, and Q&A, struggled at the box office.

He followed this with another Broadway role in the Craig Lucas hit comedy, Prelude to a Kiss, which also starred Mary-Louise Parker and Barnard Hughes.

[citation needed] During the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Hutton began to take large supporting parts in films, most notably in Everybody's All-American with Jessica Lange and Dennis Quaid and French Kiss with Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline.

Hutton starred in the television series Leverage from 2008 to 2012, where he played former insurance investigator Nate Ford, who led a group of thieves who acted as modern-day Robin Hoods.

Hutton starred in a Groupon commercial during the 2011 Super Bowl, which drew public ire for the parodying of the Tibetan resistance movement.

[10][11][12] Hutton dated Elizabeth McGovern,[13] Diane Lane,[14] Patti Davis,[15] Demi Moore,[16] Mary-Louise Parker,[13] Uma Thurman,[17] and Angelina Jolie.

[20] In November 2019, Sera Johnston, a former child model and actress, filed a criminal complaint with the Vancouver Police department accusing Hutton of raping her in 1983, when she was 14.

[21] Hutton, who was 22 when the alleged incident occurred, "completely and unequivocally" denied the accusations and filed a criminal complaint against Johnston for extortion.