Excelled at playing outsiders of all stripes
JOHN Hurt, who died last week, aged 77, from pancreatic cancer, possessed one of the greatest voices in cinema — a voice that could tremble with terror and fragility in The Elephant Man (1980) or drive its very owner mad with torment in Krapp’s Last Tape (2000).
But so often it was the voice of sage mischief, of someone so knowing, observant and sharpwitted that he could afford to puncture every pretension.
It was no surprise that this splendidly versatile English actor was called on to play so many narrators over his career, dispensing his dry storybook wisdom in pictures as different as Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006), Sightseers (2012) and even The Tigger Movie (2000).
The best of these particular vocal performances may well be among the least known. In Lars von Trier’s punishing morality plays Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005), it is Hurt’s voice — arch, insinuating and deeply sarcastic — that guides us through the director’s neoBrechtian world of spare sets and chalk outlines, and that encourages us to see his characters in the cold, harsh light that their actions demand. Hurt’s voice doesn’t just support these pictures; it speaks for them, nailing Von Trier’s misanthropic tone with ruthless accuracy.
A narrator is by definition a kind of outsider, and Hurt excelled at playing outsiders of every stripe, giving dimension to an astonishingly rich crosssection of the persecuted and marginalised.
He earned his first Academy Award nomination, for supporting actor, for Alan Parker’s 1978 prison drama, Midnight Express, in which he played Max, the wry, cynical, druggedout inmate who becomes a oneman rejoinder to all the macho bluster around him. Another outsider is Giles De’Ath, the gay English writer who crosses the Atlantic to pursue an improbable infatuation in Love and Death on Long Island (1998) and whom Hurt imbues with a poignant sense of dislocation from traditional romantic and social mores.
Hurt delivered by far his most haunting rendition of an outcast in The Elephant Man, which earned him a second Oscar nomination, this time for lead actor. Beneath the enormous facial protuberances of John Merrick in that David Lynch classic, Hurt so fully grasped the character’s terror and vulnerability that he ceased, in a sense, to be unrecognisable. He turned deformity into humanity and a disguise into a revelation.
Hurt was no slouch at playing insiders as well, and some of his most memorable performances offer a sharp, subtle critique of the trappings of power and privilege. He made an early bigscreen impression as the treacherous Lord Richard Rich in A Man for All Seasons (1966) and gave himself over to the madness and debauchery of the Roman Emperor Caligula in the 1976 TV miniseries I, Claudius. In Tomas Alfredson’s beautifully bleak adaptation of Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011), Hurt brought a marvellous gravity, at once elegiac and pokerfaced, to the role of Control, the topsecret British intelligence chief trying to root out a mole in his rapidly shifting empire.
And in James McTeigue’s V for Vendetta (2005), Hurt became the villainous face of British totalitarianism as Chancellor Adam Sutler — a sly nod to his famous performance as Winston Smith in Michael Radford’s adaptation of 1984, in which he did wily justice to the anguish of an individual crushed and warped by the workings of an authoritarian government.
Hurt could be a consummate ensemble player too, even if his performance as Kane in Alien (1979), which featured the most famous and shocking of Hurt’s many, many death scenes, inevitably came to define
Ridley Scott’s horror masterpiece for all time. He lent his voice to the animated projects Watership Down (1978), The Lord of the Rings (1978) and The Black Cauldron (1985), and he donned all manner of whitewigged fantasy garb for the benefit of the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ and ‘‘Hellboy’’ franchises.
It is often said of our best actors that they disappear into their roles, but at a certain point Hurt stopped disappearing. The pleasure of watching him onscreen came accompanied with an ‘‘aha!’’ of recognition — of hearing that elegant rasp of a voice and seeing those glinting, intelligent eyes, and knowing that, however eccentric the context, we were in exceptionally good hands.
Sir John Hurt, born in Derbyshire, UK, on January 22, 1940, starred in more than 200 films and television series over a career spanning six decades. The Oscarnominated actor was knighted for services to drama in 2015. After disclosing his pancreatic cancer the same year, Hurt reportedly told the Radio Times that his treatment was going well. ‘‘I can’t say I worry about mortality, but it’s impossible to get to my age and not have a little contemplation of it. We’re all just passing time, and occupy our chair very briefly.’’
— Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times