Right now, John Hurt can be seen in Jackie, opposite Natalie Portman as the newly widowed Mrs Kennedy’s father confessor. He is gaunt, lined, ascetic, a face redolent of wisdom leavened with a touch of kindly and sympathetic wit. It is piquant to watch his scene with her again now, talking to a fictionalised Jackie Kennedy about life and death when he himself was frankly facing death. The fact that he was suffering cancer was no secret; he wanted to keep working to the end. It was a classic John Hurt cameo. He brought depth and texture to any film he appeared in.
Like so many English character actors, he will perhaps be remembered by a certain generation for his role in the Harry Potter films: Mr Ollivander, the proprietor of the shop in Diagon Alley which sells magical wands. But Hurt’s richly humane performance as the gay author Quentin Crisp in the TV version of The Naked Civil Servant in the mid-70s was a brilliant challenge to the utterly ingrained homophobia in the Britain of those days; in an era when the whole nation sat down to the same programmes on the three channels available, his performance made the TV watchers of straight middle Britain think again about LGBT people.
I personally will never forget my small screen encounter with John Hurt in the late 1970s as Caligula in the TV drama I, Claudius: taunting Derek Jacobi’s timid Claudius and bringing his horse in to be made a consul. He was effortlessly disturbing as the evil sensualist and tyrant.
He was unforgettable in Alien as Kane – the officer whose encounter with the alien on the distant planet’s surface made millions jump out of their skins – and then made millions more (mainly men) shiver with almost Freudian anxiety as they wander what it would be like to be invaded in such horribly intimate terms. Just before, he was great as the cynical prisoner in Alan Parker’s Midnight Express, the old lag in the Turkish jail.
But it was his performance in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man which really lasered his personality on cinemagoers’ minds: all the more remarkable as he had to be entirely encased in prosthetics. He was John Merrick, the man who was tormented and exploited for his disfigurements in a Victorian freak show - only to find himself arguably exploited more insidiously by a notionally more kindly, liberal doctor: Frederick Treves, played by Anthony Hopkins. His quaveringly sensitive, refined, yet defiantly insistent voice – “Everyone has been very kind....” – became much imitated, much parodied. When Bradley Cooper played the role of Merrick recently on the London West End stage he was quite clearly doing the John Hurt voice.
In fact, that rich, slightly rasping, honey-gravel voice was an invaluable part of his acting armoury. Lars Von Trier used him as a deadpan narrator with a hint of mischief and subversion in movies like the disturbing Dogville (2003). He was a brilliant Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) playing opposite Richard Burton’s chilling state apparatchik O’Brien, howling with agony as his torturer whimsically plucks one of his teeth out to show how he has helplessly deteriorated as the prisoner of the all powerful state.
For my money though, none of these was his masterpiece as an actor. That was his utterly superb performance as the fashionable osteopath Dr Stephen Ward in Michael Caton-Jones’s Scandal (1989) - about the Profumo scandal of the 60s with Ian McKellen as Profumo and Joanne Whalley excellent as Christine Keeler. Hurt absolutely nailed a role which he had basically to invent or imagine from scratch, there being relatively little known about Ward; he was the society figure who was made a sacrificial victim by an establishment who wanted someone to blame for a Cabinet Minister’s disgrace. Hurt’s sprightly, louche outsider nailed British pomposity, snobbery and fear of sex, by getting his Stephen Ward to exist in opposition to all that.
His staggeringly productive screen career reached its autumnal stage with shrewdly chosen small roles, such as his priest in Jackie. He acted in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) and Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013), now a virtual folk memory of wisdom and acting style. A one-off.