John Vincent Hurt was born in Chesterfield, England, on Jan. 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).īecause of his skill imbuing the most eccentric parts with humanity, Hurt was one of the few actors to emerge critically unscathed from Gus Van Sant’s 1993 film, “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” in which he played the Countess, described by one British reporter as “a misogynist homosexual feminine-deodorant magnate.” 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. 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.” Above, she talks with her lawyer, Arjen Greydanus, on Nov.
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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!”įrancine Hughes Wilson, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity after setting her abusive ex-husband on fire as he slept in 1977, a story dramatized in the TV film “The Burning Bed,” died on March 22, 2017, of complications from pneumonia in Alabama. 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. Hurt played a Victorian-era Englishman whose grotesque disfigurement led to his years of exploitation as a carnival freak. One of his most touching performances came in “The Elephant Man,” which Lynch directed and Brooks helped produce. (He would lampoon that scene in Mel Brooks’s 1987 film “Spaceballs,” with his character lamenting, “Oh, no, not again!”)
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The movie provided Hurt with a graphically memorable role, as a space voyager whose stomach explodes after an extraterrestrial burrows into him. Yet he’s the most moving character in the film.”Īlthough 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. He’s an almost burned-out light bulb with just a few dim flashes of the filament left. In “Midnight Express,” she wrote, he demonstrated “such inner force that he can play the most passive of roles, as he does here (he barely moves a muscle), and still transfix the audience. In the New Yorker, film critic Pauline Kael extolled Hurt’s power and control in roles that could have gone off the rails in dramatic excess. 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.
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.
“Many people told me it would be the end of my career.” “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.
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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.Ĭareer 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. That skittish tension remained Hurt’s calling card in his roughly 200 films and TV appearances that followed.