JOHN HURT

(22 January 1940 - 27 January 2017)

The Derbyshire-born actor John Hurt attended art school and then went to RADA to study acting. On stage from 1962 he was a weedy-looking soul, the eternal student, which may explain his first appearances on TV in Z-Cars and on film in The Wild and the Willing (both 1962), the latter about love and life on a university campus. More stage work included John Osborne’s Inadmissable Evidence and David Halliwell’s Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, a play Hurt later filmed and which led to a part in Fred Zinnemann’s A Man for All Seasons. He made his biggest name as Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant, Jack Gold’s 1975 TV film and a part one couldn’t see anybody else attempting. Also on TV he made a mark as Caligula in I, Claudius with Derek Jacobi. High-profile films followed – Alien, Midnight Express and The Elephant Man – again, who else would have done it? He earned Oscar nominations for the last two. Later movies included The Sailor from Gibraltar, Sinful Davey, Before Winter Comes, 10 Rillington Place (as Timothy Evans), The Pied Piper, Heaven’s Gate, 1984 (as Winston Smith), Scandal (as Stephen Ward), The Field, Love and Death on Long Island, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, plus Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, the remakes of Brighton Rock, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Jackie, and so much more up to and including TV’s Doctor Who. Hurt made some 200 film and TV appearances, and a further four films are still to be released. He also had four wives and two children. John Hurt, who died of pancreatic cancer, was knighted in 2015 for his services to drama.

MICHAEL DARVELL