OBITUARY Sir John Hurt
OBITUARY
Sir John Hurt
Prolific actor who made misfits, victims and lunatics his speciality
John Hurt was such a staple of the acting world that he lost track of the number of films he had appeared in — probably more than 150, he thought, which equates to his performing in at least three films a year, every year, since he was 25. Typically he played life’s casualties: the eccentric, disturbed, vulnerable, persecuted or lonely. His most celebrated parts include the outrageous homosexual Quentin Crisp in the television play The Naked Civil Servant and the disfigured Joseph Merrick in the biopic The Elephant Man.
With a ravaged face that made him look older than his years and a gravelly voice (he was referred to as the actor with the “most distinctive voice in Britain”), Hurt was not by nature cut out to play romantic leads, and he rarely essayed comedy. He preferred modern works to the classics, and one of his few incursions into Shakespeare was to play the Fool in King Lear, opposite Laurence Olivier.
As he made misfits, victims and lunatics his speciality, he performed across a range of mediums. He first appeared on television in the early 1960s, yet his big break came when he played Crisp in 1975. It was a courageous decision to take on the part, but one that undoubtedly paid off. Decades later he told The Times about his first reading of the script. “It was an absolutely stunning piece of writing; it screamed off the page,” he said. “Many people told me it would be the end of my career.”
His portrayal brilliantly captured Crisp’s flamboyance, and the production was critically acclaimed. Crisp was so impressed that he called the actor “my representative here on Earth”. Hurt reprised the role in 2009 for An Englishman in New York.
Another of his most well-known television roles came soon after The Naked Civil Servant, in the BBC’s production of I, Claudius. He played the deranged emperor Caligula (mischievously described by Crisp as “only me in a sheet”). More recently he gave a gripping performance as the War Doctor in the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special.
On the big screen he appeared as the doomed Winston Smith in the adaptation of George Orwell’s Ninteen Eighty-Four and as Stephen Ward in Scandal, depicting the Profumo affair. He provided one of cinema’s most memorable moments in Ridley Scott’s Alien; his character, Kane, met a grisly end when a slime-dropping monster exploded from his chest. Arguably the performance was trumped by his dissolute drug addict in Midnight Express, for which he received an Oscar nomination.
He was somewhat disapproving of the prize-giving rigmarole. “I’ve always felt, and I think I’m qualified to say so because I’ve won a few awards, that it’s a terrible shame to put something in competition with something else to be able to sell something,” he said. Yet he was nominated again in 1981 for The Elephant Man, in which his face was obscured by prosthetics as he played a celebrity of Victorian England with severe deformities. The part required seven hours in the make-up chair every morning.
Making bold choices was, in many respects, typical of Hurt. He was often portrayed as a hell-raiser, and before he cut down was a prodigious drinker who once confessed to getting through seven bottles of wine a day and said he was surprised to have reached the age of 30. While he enjoyed carousing with his thespian crew, whose members included Peter O’Toole and Richard Harris, he did not let such excesses affect his work.
His private life fed the appetite of a prurient press. One of the best performances he gave in his later years was as the Tory MP Alan Clark in a BBC dramatisation of his politically incorrect diaries. Like Clark, Hurt attracted media attention for his drinking and marital splits. “When you get into the emotional areas, the animal areas, I think you’ll find it’s the one area where it doesn’t seem to matter what intellect you have. Some of the most highly intelligent people I know have got just the same problems when it comes to sexuality, mistakes and things,” he said.
Love was indeed complicated territory for Hurt. “I don’t necessarily agree with marriage,” he once expostulated, but he was willing to experiment, marrying four times. First, to the actress Annette Robertson, although the marriage ended in 1964 after two years — Hurt later described the relationship as “ludicrous”.
His second wife, Donna Peacock, was also an actress and an old friend; theirs was a more enduring affair, but he said later he had been “on the rebound”. He married Peacock in 1984, a year after his girlfriend, the French model Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot, was killed in a horse-riding accident near their home in Oxfordshire. They had been together for 16 years. Her death affected him deeply and was one of the greatest tragedies in his life.
Hurt’s marriage to Peacock was dissolved in 1990, and he married again that year. Jo Dalton was a production assistant he met while filming Scandal (“I was wildly in love with her”). They had two sons: Sasha, born in 1990, and Nick, born in 1993. Although Hurt came late to fatherhood, he embraced it wholeheartedly. Both of his sons became interested in the arts, Sasha is a painter and Nick shares his father’s love of acting. Their parents divorced in 1996 (the marriage reportedly foundered because of Dalton’s exasperation with Hurt’s drinking) and the boys grew up in Co Waterford in the Republic of Ireland. Hurt famously remarked that Ireland, where he lived for many years, was “where he belonged”, resulting in a fair amount of wounded English pride.
In 2005 he married Anwen Rees-Myers, a film producer 25 years his junior. A year earlier he had been thrown out of a lap-dancing club for being abusive to the staff, but at last it seemed that he had sobered up his act. It was said — though he rejected the assertion — that his fourth wife “reformed” him, and they settled near Cromer in Norfolk. Finally he could conclude that “life without love is hideous”.
John Vincent Hurt was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, in 1940. His father, Arnould, was a talented mathematician before he became a High Anglican clergyman, and his mother, Phyllis, an amateur actress. His upbringing was strict; the family lived opposite a cinema, but Hurt was forbidden from watching films there.
A small and sensitive boy, he went to an Anglo-Catholic prep school in Kent, then to Lincoln grammar school, where he discovered a talent for acting. He often ended up playing female roles, including Lady Bracknell in a school production of The Importance of Being Earnest. “I was pretty, I was small . . . I thought I was very butch, but there you are.” Despite his build, he excelled at sport, captaining the school cricket, rugby and football teams.
In later life he revealed that he, along with others, had been abused by a senior master at his religious prep school who would take out his false teeth and stick his tongue in boys’ mouths. Hurt spoke phlegmatically of the experience. “I think I just accepted what happened. I kind of knew that it couldn’t have been quite right, but it was authority.” He described himself as a lazy student and, notwithstanding all the scripts he read, he rarely turned to books simply for pleasure (“I’m not a huge reader, I’d rather live”). He was, however, captivated by Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion.
There had been an assumption when he was growing up that he would join the church, but he rejected the notion and chose the life of an agnostic. One of his two brothers also rebelled, converting to Catholicism and becoming a monk at Glenstal Abbey in Co Limerick. “It created a huge rift in the family,” Hurt said. “To my father it was as though his son was embracing the Antichrist. I’m sure he used that expression.” In addition to his brothers, Hurt had an adopted sister, Monica.
He enrolled, aged 17, at the Grimsby School of Art and later Central St Martins College of Art and Design in London — where Crisp was, neatly, one of the naked models he sketched as an art student. Throughout his life Hurt enjoyed the company of artists, counting Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon among his closest drinking pals.
A career as a painter was stillborn and Hurt instead pursued his other childhood passion, gaining a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. After he graduated his mother kept, until her death, a scrapbook filled with reviews and articles charting his successes.
He was offered a small role in a 1962 film, The Wild and the Willing, for which he was paid £75 a week. Soon he started performing on the London stage and while in a production of Little Malcolm was noticed by Fred Zinnemann, who cast him as Richard Rich in A Man for All Seasons. Within five years Hurt had been nominated for a Bafta for 10 Rillington Place, based on the true story of Timothy Evans, the semi-literate lorry driver who was wrongly hanged for murder.
Hurt’s first foray into the classics came when he played Octavius in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin. Over time his theatre appearances became more sporadic, with long gaps between them, but he made a remarkable return in 2000 in a West End production of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.
At the turn of the century he also had parts in film adaptations of two bestselling books: playing Dr Iannis, the kindly Greek sage in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and Mr Ollivander, the moon-eyed wand-seller in three films in the Harry Potter series. He won further acclaim in recent years with roles in the political thriller V for Vendetta and the Cold War espionage drama Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Hurt grew weary, however, of the endless publicity surrounding each new release — especially with the promotion of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. “I don’t suppose we could talk about the lack of enjoyment in making it?” he quipped to one journalist. He was also withering about the film’s co-creator George Lucas: “It’s all to make Mr Lucas an extra billion, as if he needs it.”
Although Hurt had a habit of being moody and mercurial in interviews (his interrogators likened him to a volatile teenager), beneath the complex veneer he could be amusing and thoughtful. He served as patron of the Proteus Syndrome Foundation, which helps those with the condition thought to have afflicted Joseph Merrick, and of Project Harar, a charity that supports children in Ethiopia with facial disfigurements.
As the years rolled by, Hurt retained his sense of style and was a loyal client of the tailor John Pearse, who dressed Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and the like. “He makes superb overcoats,” Hurt said.
Hurt was knighted in 2015, in recognition of a career spanning six decades. By then he had been honoured with a Bafta award for his outstanding contribution to cinema. He accepted it graciously, telling the audience: “I know that film means a great deal to me, but I had no idea that I meant so much to film.”
Even in his 75th year he continued working relentlessly, pursuing one project after the next. He admitted that there had been some “stinkers” along the way, but had no time for regrets. “ ‘If’ and ‘only’ are the two words in the English language that should never be put together,” he said.
Sir John Hurt, actor, was born on January 22, 1940. He died on January 25, 2017, aged 77
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