As chief spook known only as Control, he sat at the head of the table of a group of great screen thespians and bossed the lot of them. His final great performance was in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Only this month he appeared as Jackie Kennedy's priest in Jackie. His late years included many highlights: the Chorus in The Hollow Crown: Henry V, Doctor Who, Lars Von Trier's Melancholia, and a charming return after 34 years to the world of Quentin Crisp in An Englishman in New York. You should allow yourself to be the age you are and enjoy exploring that area.” Everyone says, ‘Yes but you’re established now, you can choose what you want to do.’ Probably the biggest mistake is trying to make yourself younger. And I don’t know anybody who has a career that goes swimmingly from beginning to end.
“There have been times when things haven’t been going that great. “If I’ve been anything I’ve been adventurous,” he once told me in an interview. Hurt once said that he marked scripts like an examiner and accepted anything that scores more than 50 per cent. Hurt’s are new-moon peepers, parsimonious, beady, cautious. When he was cast in the role his son said to him, “How are you going to do the eyes?” It was a good question. John Hurt was the great interpreter of damaged, unknowable enigmasĪ younger generation got to know him as Mr Ollivander, the dispenser of wands in the Harry Potter films.
ZHIHU 1984 JOHN HURT MOVIE
When he was cast as someone trying to form a normal relationship, it was in the movie where it’s not allowed: 1984.
Even in his seniority, he was more still Fool than Lear (and indeed he played the Fool to Olivier’s television Lear). Hurt by name, the characters he plays are hurt by nature. Quentin Crisp, Caligula, Profumo-suicide Stephen Ward, Elephant man John Merrick, the village idiot in The Field, his stately homo in Love and Death on Long Island, Krapp, Tory bad boy Alan Clark, the mute aristo in White Mischief – there aren’t a lot of family values embodied in his CV. There couldn’t be a more iconic signature for a career spent giving birth to weirdos, wackos, outsiders, victims, lunatics and flamboyants.