Picture above: John Hurt as a young 24 year old, as Chalie in This Is My Street [1964]

We bring you the sad news today that Sir John Hurt has died, aged 77 –  after a long and illustrious career spanning more than 5 decades. Ian Hendry worked with John in the earleir year, when John Hurt played Charlie in This Is My Street is a 1964 British drama film directed by Sidney Hayers also starring June Ritchie, Avice Landone and Meredith Edwards.^[2] The screenplay is by Bill MacIlwraith from a novel by Nan Maynard about a bored housewife living in a run down inner city London house begins an affair with the lodger, a salesman.

See film excerpt with John Hurt on Youtube

After The Naked Civil Servant, Hurt went on to appear in Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout (as a composer who is terrorised by a mysterious stranger, played by Alan Bates), voicing the role of Hazel in an animated adaptation of Watership Down, and playing Caligula in the BBC’s celebrated TV adaptation of I Claudius, Hurt took another step upwards with memorable supporting roles in major Hollywood productions – both by British directors.

Alan Parker cast him as an English junkie in a Turkish jail in 1978’s Midnight Express (for which Hurt won a Bafta and a Golden Globe for best supporting actor, and was nominated for an Oscar). The following year saw him take the role with which he arguably made the most permanent impact on popular culture: Kane, the crew member of the Nostromo in the Ridley-Scott-directed Alien, out of whose chest an xenomorph gruesomely bursts.

As Crisp later wrote, Hurt seemed to “specialise in victims”; he next went on to play one of the most heart-rending of all in The Elephant Man, directed by David Lynch. Notoriously, the extensive make-up and prosthetics required to recreate John Merrick’s physical deformities meant Hurt had to endure seven hours of preparation each day; however, the difficulties paid off when Hurt was nominated again for an Oscar, this time for best actor. (He lost out to Robert de Niro for Raging Bull.)

Having been elevated to these heady heights, Hurt then embarked on a blizzard of wildly differing roles, moving rapidly between genres and continents as he went. He was cast in Hollywood films such as Heaven’s Gate and The Osterman Weekend; comedies such as History of the World Part 1 (for his Elephant Man producer Mel Brooks); and British independents such as the Stephen Frears directed The Hit, Champions, in which he played a Grand National winning jockey, and Nineteen Eighty Four, as Winston Smith opposite Richard Burton. His rich, rasping tones were perfect for animation and voiceover: he worked on The Plague Dogs and The Black Cauldron as well as the celebrated Don’t Die of Ignorance public health warning about Aids.

This prolific, eclectic career continued through the 90s and 2000s: he worked with fashionable arthouse directors like Gus Van Sant (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues), Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man, The Limits of Control) and Lars von Trier (Dogville, Manderlay) while making regular outings in Hollywood, including Rob Roy, Contact, Hellboy, V for Vendetta and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Reportedly, though, his personal favourites were Love and Death on Long Island in which he played an ageing author obsessed with a young man, and The Field, Jim Sheridan’s fable of strife in a remote Irish village.

The advent of the British commercial-cinema revival in the same period saw Hurt called upon for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and the Harry Potter films (where Hurt appeared as the wand-maker Mr Ollivander in the first film, Philosopher’s Stone, and the final two, Deathly Hallows. He continued to alternate between gamey Hollywood fare – such as Immortals and Hercules – with more considered work: he played Control in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; a centuries-old vampire called Christopher Marlowe in Only Lovers Left Alive, again for Jarmusch; and the guru-like Gilliam in Snowpiercer.

Picture: John Hurt – King’s Head Theatre, Islington in the 1970s

Though he always prioritised film acting, Hurt also made regular appearances on stage, including the first West End production of David Halliwell’s cult play Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs in 1967 (before going on to appear in the 1974 film version, funded by George Harrison). However, he was most identified with a series of performances of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, which he first played in 1999. Hurt also played numerous roles on TV, including Alan Clark in the 2004 adaptation of The Alan Clark Diaries and the Doctor in the 50th anniversary special episode of Doctor Who in 2013.

Hurt had a turbulent personal life: he was married four times, and between his first and second marriages he had a 15-year-relationship with a partner, Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot, who died in 1983 after a horse-riding accident. (He had two children, Alexander and Nicholas, with his third wife, Jo Dalton.) In 2008 he admitted to having recovered from a long-term problem with alcohol, that had seen him tentatively grouped with the likes of Richard Harris and Peter O’Toole as a “hellraiser”. However his distinguished work over six decades was recognised with a special Bafta for outstanding British contribution to cinema in 2012, and a knighthood in 2015.

Source: The Guardian

Our thoughts go out to his family, friends and many fans around the world.

Until next time,

Neil Hendry
Editor, Official Tribute To Ian Hendry

Further Reading

A detailed account of the life and work of Ian Hendry in the new biography:

Read: ‘Send in the Clowns – The Yo Yo Life Of Ian Hendry’ by Gabriel Hershman