Hurt’s legacy lives on
JOHN Hurt, who lost his battle with pancreatic cancer at the age of 77 last week, was special.
He was every whiskysoaked cigarette butt, matted to your clothes after a magnificently unsavoury night out. He was an icon of suffering and survival – a martyr of stage and screen.
He died all the time, and can’t be dead. It sometimes felt like he was rasping his way to immortality.
Hurt was always the one who got it worst in films; it hurt, being John Hurt.
Think of him in Alien (1979) as poor Kane, the most likeable and easygoing of the Nostromo’s crew, who of course was the one to have a slimy proboscis shoved down his throat, a hideous organism clamped to his face for days, and another one primed to burst through his abdominal wall in the grossest childbirth scene in film history.
Of course, Hurt was the attempted escapee from a hellhole of a Turkish jail in Midnight Express (1978), who winds up only transcending its horrors by sliding into a heroin stupor.
Naturally he voiced Hazel, the main rabbit, in the unbelievably harrowing Watership Down (1978).
Obviously he was Winston Smith, literature’s ultimate loser, in the version of 1984 that denied all science-fictional remove by being made in 1984. And yes, he was a vampire version of the murdered playwright Christopher Marlowe in Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), who faked his death back in 1593 but manages to die, hideously, from contaminated blood, centuries later.
Hurt’s most celebrated film role is probably John Merrick in The Elephant Man (1980). He’s utterly astonishing.
Underneath that suffocating, prosthetic head he conveys a beautiful, yearning and grateful soul.
And his will, at the end, to silently argue that enough’s enough makes it one of the most redemptive tragedies ever filmed.
The stories about Hurt will outlive him for decades.
At some awards do – he was never being given one, and always should have been – he climbed on to his designated table some time around dessert and demanded that the wine be replenished. Only Hurt, when performing Beckett’s hour-long Krapp’s Last Tape to two packed houses in the West End every night, would describe in detail the meal he liked to consume before his “second Krapp”.
Thankfully, a film survives of this performance, directed by Atom Egoyan.
No one else could have given Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003) such music in the voiceover. But he doesn’t utter a single word in Iain Softley’s The Skeleton Key ( 2005) because his character is a stroke casualty.
As for the last film, there look to be a half-dozen in post-production. Right now, he’s there in Pablo Larraín’s sensational Jackie, as an Irish priest trying to guide the widowed Jackie Kennedy through her despair.
We tended to trust John Hurt when he acted his way through dying. He’s caught up – too soon, even at 77 – with a life’s project any actor could learn from. And it’s such a moving legacy. — The Sunday Telegraph