John Hurt was an actor who gave compelling depth to desperate, flawed and sometimes monstrously deformed characters in performances that captivated audiences and critics for more than five decades.
The actor announced in 2015 that he had pancreatic cancer. His agent, Charles McDonald, confirmed Hurt’s death to The Washington Post. He was 77.
No further details were immediately known. Hurt had recently appeared as a Catholic priest in the film Jackie opposite Natalie Portman.
The son of an Anglican vicar, Hurt discovered as a youth that he “didn’t go for God.” But like his father, he once observed, he spent his life revealing to others certain truths about human nature.
His tools included an almost singularly expressive face, one that with age came to be defined by a rutted forehead and baggy, hooded eyes.
His voice was a gravelly rasp, coloured by excessive drink and smoke.
Hurt was widely admired for his range, intensity and empathy in portraying the most complicated and outcast lives. David Lynch, who directed the actor in his title role in The Elephant Man (1980), once called Hurt “simply the greatest actor in the world.”
After a promising start on stage, he found his first notable screen role in the Oscar-winning A Man for All Seasons (1966), which starred Paul Scofield as the martyred Englishman Thomas More.
That skittish tension remained Hurt’s calling card in his roughly 200 films and TV appearances that followed. He embraced mainstream hits, including the Harry Potter series – he played the wand maker Ollivander – as well as more disquieting fare, such as Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape in which he gave, on stage and television, a tour de force depiction of a regretful writer.
Career highlights include the taut film 10 Rillington Place (1971), as a man of low mental faculties wrongly executed for murders committed by the British serial killer John Christie, and The Naked Civil Servant (1975), a British TV movie about the gay author and raconteur Quentin Crisp.
“It was a very risky piece for an actor – a television play about an effeminate homosexual who is also an exhibitionist,” he told the Sunday Times of London in 2000. “Many people told me it would be the end of my career.”
In another celebrated British miniseries, I, Claudius (1976), Hurt gave a terrifying portrayal of the Roman emperor Caligula, a mad degenerate who fancies himself a god. Two years later, Hurt received his first Oscar nomination, for his supporting role in Midnight Express as an English junkie abused by guards in a Turkish jail.
That scene! That space film! Photo supplied
Although he lost the supporting Oscar bid to Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter, Hurt had appeared on Hollywood’s radar and was cast in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi thriller Alien (1979), a box office grand slam.
The movie provided Hurt with a graphically memorable role, as a space voyager whose stomach explodes after an extraterrestrial burrows into him. (He would lampoon that scene in Mel Brooks’s 1987 film Spaceballs, with his character lamenting, “Oh, no, not again!”)
Hurt as The Elephant Man. Photo / Supplied
One of his most touching performances came in The Elephant Man, which Lynch directed and Brooks helped produce. Hurt played a Victorian-era Englishman whose grotesque disfigurement led to his years of exploitation as a carnival freak.
Hurt underwent six hours of makeup application each day to play Joseph Merrick – called John in the film – a man of dignity, tenderness and refinement underneath his deformity.
In one of the film’s most notable sequences, Merrick is cornered by a mob into a train station urinal and collapses while shouting, “I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man!”
Hurt’s performance garnered an Oscar nomination for a leading role, but he lost to Robert De Niro as boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull.
Hurt also played such haunted characters from literature as Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1979), and he was superb as Winston Smith, a rebellious employee of the Ministry of Truth, in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), based on the George Orwell book about a totalitarian future.
He was Jesus at the Last Supper, confused by an intrusive waiter, in Brooks’s History of the World: Part I (1981); the libidinous society osteopath Stephen Ward in Scandal (1989), about the Profumo-Keeler sex scandal that shook 1960s England; an erudite English writer smitten with a teenage heartthrob (Jason Priestley) in Love and Death on Long Island (1997); and an omniscient, enigmatic billionaire who funds an astronomer (Jodie Foster) in Contact (1997).
John Vincent Hurt was born in Chesterfield, England, on January 22, 1940, and grew up in Cleethorpes.
He described his parents as distant and severe, prohibiting him from mixing with neighbourhood children they deemed “common.” He felt further isolated at a series of preparatory schools, one where he later said he was sexually abused by an administrator. An older brother rebelled against his parents by converting to Catholicism and later became a Benedictine monk.
He attended art school to honour his parents’ request that he train for a fallback career before winning a scholarship to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
Early on, despite his wispy physical appearance, he was singled out by theatre critics for his magnetism. His portrayal of a rebellious art student in David Halliwell’s dark comedy Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs – which he reprised onscreen in 1974.
Hurt returned periodically to the stage, with the Royal Shakespeare Company and elsewhere, but he focused chiefly on a screen career that encompassed adaptations of King Lear, horror films, fantasies and westerns.
In such a prolific career, he was not without his misfires, including a version of Romeo and Juliet featuring an otherwise all-feline cast. He also played the British spy chief known as “Control” in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), a critically lauded version of the John le Carré novel about deceit.
Hurt was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2014 for his contributions to drama.
Culturedemandsgeeks will miss you Sir John Hurt, and we wish you the fondest travels in whatever world you happen to grace upon in your next life.
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