Sir John Hurt died at the age of 77

We just celebrated his birthday, now we have to say goodbye to John Hurt. "The Elephant Man", "1984", "Alien" or "Queen, King, Ace, Spy" - Hurt always shone. A great actor, whose always melancholy facial expression cast a spell over you immediately. In his experimental, inquisitive work, John Hurt found many other ways, loud and quiet, but always impressive, to express his characters. No matter where Hurt appeared, he was remembered, he was big even in the small roles.

Eccentrics and outcasts, crazy autocrats and tormented resisters: the actor John Hurt plunged body and soul into the abysses of human nature. No other actor of his generation embodied pain and injury as intensely as the Briton, who was born in 1940. Hurt never pushed his game forward, was never a front-row man like his friends and drinking cronies Oliver Reed and Peter O'Toole, and yet his best roles are burned deep into the collective cinematic memory: the "elephant man" Joseph Merrick, Gay icon Quentin Crisp, Winston Smith in "1984" or the Roman ruler Caligula were just a few of the roles he played. Hurt was able to embody the full range of human weakness and fragility with the intensity of his early wrinkled face and the sinewy wiryness of his physique. He immersed himself completely in each of his roles, no matter how deep the abyss seemed.

The son of an Anglican vicar, Hurt grew up in pious circumstances in the English county of Lincolnshire. The father was aloof, as the youngest of three siblings, Hurt clung to his mother's coattails, but was already doing all kinds of practical jokes as an altar boy in the service, when he intentionally overfilled the incense burners to fog the congregation and make them faint. However, he failed at the church prep school and was sent to a public school. A culture shock that deeply impressed Hurt: the authoritarian strictness of the teachers, the brutality of the bullies in the schoolyard, the constant swearing - hardships in the working class that the sheltered pastor's son had never known before. Hurt retreated into fantasy worlds and, being teased and intimidated, developed his underdog flair. In 1966, director Fred Zinnemann discovered the stage and television actor and gave him a supporting role as Richard Rich in the film adaptation of the novel «A Man in Every Season».

After many smaller roles and several years as an ensemble member at the Royal Shakespeare Company, he did not experience his breakthrough until 1975 with his leading role as scene star Quentin Crisp in the TV biopic "The Naked Civil Servant". In the 1979s, gay cinema was still establishing itself apart from voyeurism or didactics, so Hurt's fearless, bitchy-flamboyant portrayal of the queer icon caused a stir. The following year he shocked television audiences again with his outright insane Caligula in I, Claudius, crawling into bed with his dying grandmother and cutting the unborn child out of his pregnant sister's belly. Three years later, Hurt won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor and an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of inmate Max in Alan Parker's prison shocker The Midnight Express. XNUMX followed one of Hurt's shortest but most spectacular cinema appearances. In Ridley Scott's space thriller «Alien» he plays the pathetic crew member Kane, whose ribcage erupts after a greedy spaghetti dinner and the first horror creature erupts. The shock mixed with pain and disbelief on Kane's face is more terrifying than the grandiose special effects in this scene.

Hurt also had to deal with physical disability in 1980 in David Lynch's "The Elephant Man". He played, practically unrecognizable under monstrous deformations, the British Joseph Merrick (called John in the film) who was afflicted with the rare lymphatic disorder elephantiasis. His outcry at the end of the film went through marrow and leg: «I'm not an animal. I'm a human being!» The touching performance, often compared to Boris Karloff's classic Frankenstein performance, earned Hurt another Oscar nomination. Thrown back under the heavy mask solely on painful, frightened or contemptuous looks and gestures, Hurt designed a figure that is as pitiable as it is dignified. With the same sensitivity, Hurt also turned the individual Winston Smith, who resisted the authoritarian "Big Brother" regime with poetry, into an acting event. When Michael Radford's film adaptation of George Orwell's social dystopia "1984" was released in the cinema in the same year, the suffering and frailty of his film characters had long been reflected in John Hurt's private life: His longtime partner Marie-Lise Volpelière-Pierrot died in 1983 in a riding accident. Hurt became addicted to alcohol, which he had been into since his early days because of insecurity.

Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) - Rats - Richard Burton - John Hurt

In later years of his career, Hurt excelled as an accomplished and reliable supporting actor and speaker in dozens of roles: His minimal but effective roles as Mr Ollivander in two parts of the Harry Potter series remain unforgotten, as well as concise roles in Lars von Trier's "Melancholia". and as the head of the secret service in the Le Carré adaptation «Queen, King, Ace, Spy». Ambition, he once told the Guardian, was never his thing. "I've observed incredibly ambitious people: at the moment of success, they know exactly where to go, they know how to deal with it, and then things really get going for them. Great. But that's not how I work." In July 2015 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Married four times and a dry cricket fan for many years, he had never been religious, despite his childhood conditioning.

V for Vendetta High Chancellor Scenes

John Hurt died in London on Saturday night of complications from pancreatic cancer. Just a year ago he had appeared in the British press confident that he could beat cancer. I can't even count how many genre films the man acted in, the most famous ones have already been mentioned, but here there are also Sam Peckinpahs in « The Osterman Weekend" or he voiced the rabbit Hazel in "Watership Down" and voiced Aragorn in Ralph Bakshi's cartoon The Hobbit. Hurt always stayed true to sci-fi and fantasy, was the leader of the insurgents in «Snowpiercer» and of course the diabolical Great Chancellor in «V for Vendetta». John Hurt was truly a legend of genre film. A really great actor leaves the stage. Rest in peace. Thanks for all the magic, John.