John Hurt - Biography

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One of Britain's most esteemed and prolific actors, the appropriately-named John Hurt (no one does hurt like Hurt) has fashioned a career as a consummate screen chameleon who lives his parts to the fullest without revealing the man behind the mask. The son of a rigid Anglican minister, he first went to art school before succumbing to his passion and attending London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. After making both his professional stage debut ("Infanticide in the House of Fred Ginger") and his feature debut ("The Young and the Willing") in 1962, he earned raves the following year onstage in Harold Pinter's "The Dwarfs". Though he came to Broadway in the title role of "Hamp" (1965), it was his work in a 1966 London production of "Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuch" which convinced director Fred Zinnemann to cast him as the Judas role of Richard Rich in the Academy Award-winning film version of Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons" (also 1966), bringing the young actor his widest exposure to that time.

Hurt's performance as the extremely nervous, fresh-faced Rich led to work with distinguished directors like Tony Richardson ("The Sailor from Gibraltar" 1967), John Huston ("Sinful Davey" 1969) and J Lee Thompson ("Before Winter Comes" 1969), but it was his hysterical turn as wrongfully accused murderer Timothy John Evans in Richard Fleischer's "10 Rillington Place" (1970) that first displayed his signature ability to convey mental anguish. As he aged, his prematurely ravaged face would only heighten the wounded expression and flair for suffering of his vulnerable victims and outsiders suffering the scorn of others. Hurt remained a well-kept secret, acting onstage in the works of Pinter ("The Caretaker" 1972, "The Dumb Waiter" 1973) and Tom Stoppard ("Travesties" 1974), but his landmark portrayal of the flamboyantly gay Quentin Crisp in the acclaimed British TV-movie "The Naked Civil Servant" (1975) finally brought him stardom. On its heels, he delivered riveting performances as the crazed, cruel Caligula in the campy and immensely enjoyable TV miniseries "I, Claudius" (BBC, 1976) and as the doomed heroin addict inmate of a Turkish jail in "Midnight Express" (1978), for which he garnered a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.

After his abdominal pains unleashed an unwanted presence in "Alien" (1979), Hurt endured a punishing makeup routine to lay bare the torment of the grotesquely deformed John Merrick in David Lynch's "The Elephant Man" (1980, produced by Mel Brooks), earning another Oscar nod, this time as Best Actor. He maintained a high profile during the early 80s with a cameo as Jesus in Brooks' "History of the World, Part I" (1981) and starring turns as an East German escaping Communism via balloon in "Night Crossing" (also 1981), a simpering gay cop in "Partners" (1982) and a vengeful CIA agent in Sam Peckinpah's last film "The Osterman Weekend" (1983) before opting to work primarily in British films. Perhaps his best work of the decade was his central performance as thought criminal Winston Smith in "1984" (1984), Michael Radford's admirably low-key and harrowing adaptation of the George Orwell classic. The director's images emphasized the character's tragic isolation as an increasingly unhappy rewriter of history as Hurt's haggard visage eloquently projected the agony experienced as a result of his actions. He was also excellent as the brooding, experienced assassin in Stephen Frears' "The Hit" (1985) and as the taciturn British colonel "gone native" in Radford's "White Mischief" (1988).

Although his resume boasted plenty of mainstream pictures throughout the 90s (i.e., "King Ralph" 1991, "Wild Bill" 1995, "Contact" 1997) Hurt has always been willing to work with independents and first-time directors. (Even Lynch and Parker who oversaw his Oscar-nominated efforts were merely sophomore directors.) Two first-time helmers who cast the parched and rumpled Hurt to perfection were Michael Caton-Jones in "Scandal" (1989) and Richard Kwietniowski in "Love and Death on Long Island" (1997). In the former as the charming but shallow Steven Ward, the real-life physician-pimp who inadvertently helped topple a cabinet minister, he sought the company of powerful and beautiful friends and suffered social ostracism as the scandal's scapegoat, committing suicide before the final chips had fallen. In the latter picture recalling "Death in Venice" and "Lolita", he managed to be both dour and droll as the very discerning English man of letters who becomes hopelessly obsessed with an All-American teen movie heartthrob (Jason Priestley) and steps out of his cloistered Old World existence to pursue the New World dude on his own turf, receiving his best reviews in years. He also worked with first-timers Jeremy Thomas ("All the Little Animals" 1998), Matthew Modine ('If... Dog...Rabbit", aired on Cinemax in 1999) and Janusz Kaminski ("Lost Souls" 2000) with varying results. The actor would continue to distinctively ply his trade in a steady string of films, including "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" (2001), as Mr. Ollivander in "Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone" (2001), Porfiry in "Crime and Punishment" (2002) and as the narrator of director Lars von Trier's "Dogville" (2004). But his highest profile role of the era was as Professor "Broom" Bruttenholm, the scientist who raises a demon infant to become earth's greatest paranormal hero in the in the comic book adaptation "Hellboy" (2004).

Unlike many of his British contemporaries, Hurt had not returned often to the theater in the years since "The Naked Civil Servant", and his reputation rested primarily on his film and TV work. His smashing success in "Krapp's Last Tape" (1999), Samuel Beckett's autobiographical one-man drama, changed all that. In his first stage turn since starring opposite Helen Mirren in Turgenev's "A Month in the Country" (1995), he was simply brilliant as the sweaty old man looking back on the sorry wreckage of his life. Sporting a spiky shock of cropped hair to go with his own weathered features, Hurt was the spitting image of the playwright and had stated an intention to return periodically to the piece, as well as to entertain offers for other stage roles. If he never stepped before the cameras again, the actor could make a handsome living providing narration or character voices for a wide variety of TV and film projects. He has lent his rich dulcet tones to such animated features as "The Lord of the Rings" and "Watership Down" (both 1978), "The Black Cauldron" (1985), "Thumbelina" (1994) and "The Tigger Movie" (2000) and was also the voice of the titular in "Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent Van Gogh" (1987). Included among his frequent outings as a narrator are the TV documentaries "Paul McCartney: Going Home" (The Disney Channel, 1991) and The Discovery Channel's "True Story of the Elephant Man" (1997), which put him back in touch with the tragic John Merrick.