‘Life without John is still so very raw’
In her first interview since his death, Anwen, Sir John Hurt’s widow, tells Maureen Paton about their marriage – and his hidden talent
Sir John Hurt’s widow, Anwen, is recalling how she first met her future husband at the bar in London’s Groucho Club in 2003. She had previously bumped into him at the wrap party for the film White Mischief in 1987 but, back then, had felt much too daunted to talk to the star of such iconic films as The Elephant Man and Alien.
Yet, 16 years later, at the Groucho she found herself “meeting the man, not the actor” and remembers: “He had no airs or graces: he was just charming and funny and gentlemanly, and he didn’t disappoint.” Despite the 15-year age gap, the then 63-year-old Hurt and Anwen, a musical actress turned commercials producer, instantly clicked and married two years later in 2005.
By then, John Hurt had the wreckage from three marriages and other tumultuous relationships behind him. Brought up “by fear and bullying”, and mistaking sexual abuse by a prep schoolmaster for the affection he missed from his vicar father, who had sent him off to board at the age of seven, he once remarked that he had always “resisted people who conspire to hector”.
Anwen had first become aware of Hurt’s work after her scandalised parents told their 20-year-old daughter not to watch his performance as Quentin Crisp in ITV’S taboo-breaking The Naked
Civil Servant in 1975. She defied them, of course.
“When we got together, perhaps people thought I was a floozy or something – but if you’re lucky enough to meet at the right time in your lives, the age gap doesn’t matter anyway. John went down on one knee to propose – it was very sweet, magical in fact.”
This is Anwen’s first national newspaper interview since Hurt’s death from pancreatic cancer in January last year. Known by her first name, rather than Lady Hurt, the blue-jeaned Anwen meets me in the Georgian farmhouse in North Norfolk that she and John had bought less than a year before he died, after moving from nearer the coast. The circumstances of her first proper encounter with John drinking in the Groucho Club perhaps come as no surprise, given Hurt’s history of measuring out his life in draughts of alcohol.
Like most people, Anwen had heard “the legendary stories” of his hell-raising past with the likes of Francis Bacon, Richard Harris, Peter O’toole and Oliver Reed in Soho drinking dens such as Muriel’s [aka The Colony Room], with Hurt once getting thrown out of the lap-dancing club Spearmint Rhino for “boorish behaviour”. Yet Hurt’s bleakest period was blamed on the death, in a freak riding accident, of his long-term girlfriend Marie-lise Volpeliere-pierrot in 1983, whom he was about to marry. After subsequently filming George Orwell’s 1984 with Richard Burton, the two actors went on an extended bar crawl in Celigny, Switzerland, after which Burton
developed an intracerebral haemorrhage and died at 58.
Towards the end, Hurt praised Anwen’s “calming influence” and credited her with helping him give up drinking. She puts the record straight by telling me: “I didn’t tell him to stop – I wasn’t going to police him. In fact, it was John who said one day, ‘I just don’t want to do it any more.’
“That’s not to say he didn’t still have a drink from time to time, but it wasn’t such a big part of his life. He was in the right frame of mind, the right emotional space, to be able to do it. Maybe I was the calming influence that he said I was, but he had stopped for long periods before anyway. If he hadn’t he wouldn’t have been around for me to meet – or to complete the body of work he did, especially on stage.”
While he had put his hell-raising days behind him, there was one addiction he simply couldn’t kick.
“The hardest of all was nicotine,” she reveals, “because it’s insidious. I felt strongly about it because I hated it – it’s the most destructive and dangerous thing. So I’d tell him how horrible it smelt and how bad it was for him.
“I caught him smoking once in the street after recording a voice-over in Soho; I just said ‘Hello, I’ll see you later’ and carried on walking. He looked like a naughty boy who had been caught behind the bike shed. John’s lungs weren’t in a great state. He had smoked massively when he was younger – Gitanes and Gauloises.”
Pancreatitis – an inflammation of the pancreas for which Anwen tells me Hurt had undergone an operation in the early Eighties – is linked with an increased risk of pancreatic cancer, especially in smokers. Yet she takes comfort from the fact that he survived for more months than many pancreatic cancer patients.
Having been diagnosed in 2015, his death at the beginning of 2017 came after a period of remission. He had even managed, despite still undergoing chemotherapy, to film in April and May 2016 his last starring role, in the indie film That Good
Night, with its art-imitates-life theme of a dying writer – although he had to withdraw from the roles of Don Quixote in Terry Gilliam’s film and Chamberlain in Joe Wright’s Darkest
Hour. “They wouldn’t have been able to insure him by that stage; it was a great sadness for him,” recalls Anwen.
By the autumn, he had been hospitalised. “While he was in hospital he had a fall and broke his hip, which really knocked him sideways, and then he kept getting sepsis. But he had such a strength of will; his mind kept him going. And he never lost that wonderful boyish spryness,” she says.
Anwen was determined that her husband spend his last days at home, which duly happened. In the aftermath of his death, Anwen admits that life without his vivid presence felt “incredibly raw”; she even took to wearing “a lot of his clothes at the beginning, which I found very comforting”.
She got through the darkest of days with the love and support of close friends and neighbours, such as the poet Jehane Lloyd-pack, whose own actor husband Roger Lloyd-pack had also died of pancreatic cancer. People have been “so supportive and kind”, she says, that she could never bear to move from the house that they hoped would be their forever home. “It’s amazing how people have looked after me.”
She’s also in regular contact with his sons Nick and Sasha, now 25 and 28 – who he had with his third wife, American production assistant Joan Dalton. “Although they’re off doing their own things, which is natural at their age, they keep in touch, Nick particularly,” she says. “He is very gregarious; Sasha is much shyer,” she adds, showing me a portrait that the talented Sasha gave her of himself with a nose ring and spectacles.
Now, 18 months after his passing, Anwen feels ready to pay the ultimate tribute to her husband by revealing another of his talents to the world. As well as being a world-class actor, Hurt, a former art-school student, was a passionate painter.
“He didn’t regard his art as a hobby at all,” says Anwen. “It was just as important as acting to him. John didn’t do things by halves – whether it was painting or acting or life, really. He took it all on.” From this weekend, in its 10th anniversary year, the Holt Festival will host the first-ever public exhibition of the paintings and drawings that Hurt created throughout his life, along with the newly inaugurated Sir John Hurt Art Prize.
Amid the beautiful, haunting landscapes, there are portraits that include several of Anwen, as well as self-portraits that reveal a glimpse of the man he saw himself to be.
Anwen, the newly appointed artistic director for the festival from next year, was first asked to exhibit his paintings at Holt last summer as a tribute. “I couldn’t possibly have done it then, since it was still too raw for me,” she explains. “But I’m now sharing these images because it’s another aspect of his commitment to truth.
“He was very critical of his work, like all artists, so I’ve had many sleepless nights thinking about what he would say about me doing this. But I’m also screening three of his favourite, lesser-seen films – The Hit,
The Field and Love and Death on Long
Island – at this year’s festival, so I now feel as if John sort of curated it all.
“Something else John and I had in common was that neither of us had any great game plan; his view was that life just took you this way or that,” Anwen says, adding: “When I asked him if he had any great late-life ambition to play parts like King Lear, he said he didn’t think like that. As he put it, ‘It’s up to somebody else to ask me. I’m simply the sum of other people’s imaginations’.”
‘I wore a lot of John’s clothes at the beginning, which I found very comforting’