H ow things have come to a pretty pass! It takes a Harry Potter film for audiences today to get acquainted with the work of some of English cinema’s finest and most peculiarly gifted souls.
Given the legions pleasurably afflicted by Pottermania, that’s a harsh, curmudgeonly opinion, but true all the same. When hell-raiser Richard Harris passed away in 2002, “Dumbledore’s gone” was the bulb that flashed in many a mind. Few, if any, remembered him for his other commanding performances.
John Hurt, who passed away last week aged 77, is another casualty of Ms. Rowling’s creations.
Present-day cinema goers identify him with Mr. Ollivander in the Potter franchise, but to the more informed, he is indelibly etched as the Roman tyrant Caligula in the 1976 BBC television masterpiece I, Claudius, based on the racy and classic 1930s novels by Robert Graves.
However stunning Derek Jacobi’s performance is as the stuttering, deceptively idiotic Claudius, it is Hurt, disturbingly mesmerizing as the crazed Emperor, who is the raison d’ etre for keeping your eyes glued to the screen, leaving you screaming for more.
Britain in the mid-1960s was churning out some truly unusual and fascinating actors. What distinguished Hurt from his illustrious contemporaries like Albert Finney, Alan Bates and Anthony Hopkins was the disturbing ease with which he got under the skin of his characters, never shirking from probing their very hearts of darkness.
This, all the more remarkable as the slightly-built, pasty-faced Hurt was hardly leading man material or a compelling screen presence physically.
Despite an outwardly, unthreatening mien, he sneaked into a film with an unnerving intensity, dominating proceedings in films like the wonderfully bizarre gangster drama The Hit (1984) and the sci-fi Alien (1979).
The youngest of all his contemporaries, but certainly the most unusual of them all, his quirkiness saw him working with directors as diverse as Fred Zinemann and David Lynch to Ridley Scott and Sam Peckinpah.
Hurt snared his first big screen role as the conniving Richard Rich in Fred Zinemman’s highbrow A Man for all Seasons (1966), from Robert Bolt’s play. A typically non-threatening presence, Hurt’s character becomes the pivot in the sly plot to undermine Paul Scofield’s noble Thomas More. Despite a small part, it is such an effective performance that it threatens to steal the show from even Robert Shaw’s blustery Henry VIII.
His searing impact in even the smallest of roles and cameos prompted a critic to aptly comment that Hurt could “pack a whole emotional universe into the twitch of an eyebrow, a sardonic slackening of the mouth”.
His first big film role as the hapless, semi-literate John Christie, wrongly convicted and executed for murder in the chilling 10 Rillington Place (1970) was even more impressive. While Richard Attenborough has a showy role as the creepy serial killer John Christie, it is Hurt as the inarticulate, angry, and pathetic working-class man unable to prove his innocence, who leaves an indelible impression.
Five years later, Hurt broke out with one his finest performances in the controversial television film, The Naked Civil Servant , masterfully portraying the flamboyant and outrageous homosexual icon-aesthete Quentin Crisp. So startling was his perfection that it caused Crisp to call Hurt “my representative here on Earth”.
Defying the reservations of many about taking a role which could hamstring his career, Hurt became an instant sensation in this role, unraveling a complex range of emotions in his thrillingly effete performance.
US audiences got a taste of Hurt’s prowess when he played the drug-addicted, philosophically fatalistic inmate of a Turkish prison to perfection in Alan Parker’s Midnight Express (1978). While the film generated a storm of controversy about its depiction of Turkish people as sadistic brutes, it was a fine showcase for Hurt’s versatility (he was nominated for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar), especially in the heartbreaking scene when he reacts to the deliberate killing of his cat, his sole companion in the prison.
1980 saw Hurt adding another stunning portrait to his unique gallery of creations with his performance as the hideously deformed John Merrick who becomes a circus attraction in Lynch’s Victorian-era drama The Elephant Man . While his grueling make-up routine became the stuff of cinema lore, Hurt managed to convey calm dignity and Merrick’s deep humanity through the layers of wax paint, earning his only Best Actor Oscar nomination for his pains.
George’s Orwell’s 1984 finally got an appropriately bleak, first-class celluloid treatment in Michael Radford’s film version made the same year as the book’s title. Hurt essayed another role he was seemingly born to play - that of the broken party official Winston Smith, valiantly struggling against the future, trying to salvage the falsified past.
As the chain-smoking, gravelly-voiced protagonist trapped in totalitarian dystopia, Hurt, his lined face wracked with fear of transgression, was painfully effective. His scene with Richard Burton (magnificently chilling as the sinister party apparatchik O’Brien), wherein the latter tortures and brainwashes him, must rank as one of the high points of latter-day British cinema.
The same year, Hurt’s myriad gifts were utilized to the hilt in Stephen Frears doggedly unpredictable gangster drama, The Hit. As the ruthlessly enigmatic hitman ‘Mr. Braddock’ assigned to bring Terence Stamp’s stool pigeon to justice, Hurt chew into his role with relish.
Fine as these performances were, they cannot best his in three-dimensional tour de force as the fashionable osteopath Dr. Stephen Ward in Scandal , a fictionalized recreation of the notorious Profumo scandal of the 1960s which became a political cause celebre.
With characteristic subversion, Hurt managed to transform his character of Dr. Ward, assigning it dimensions never thought of as little in the factual sense was known about the real-life person. His matchless portrayal of a scapegoat sacrificed by the British political establishment measures up to some of British acting’s finest creations ever conceived by an actor.
After portraying sadists, neurotics, homosexuals, just how well Hurt could evoke kindliness is evidenced by his humane portrayal of an understanding priest in war-scarred Rwanda in the recent Beyond the Gates .
It was not for nothing that director David Lynch once remarked that Hurt was “the greatest actor in the world.”
While no award has been as devalued as the Academy Awards, it is maddening that not a single one graced Hurt’s illustrious career. Any of his uniquely great performances were worth several. Perhaps audiences and critics dreaded to wholeheartedly embrace his startlingly unpredictable creations, as inscrutable as the many lines of his seemingly animated face.
