John Hurt, 1940–2017
Before Patrick Stewart did Star Trek or Ian McKellen did X-Men, John Hurt’s acting made pulp fiction legitimate. For forty years, pop culture was his career.
There are actors everyone knows from different things. Tim Curry is one, Joanna Lumley is another—but John Hurt was the paradigm. Most actors make their names with one or two star roles: Ian McKellen is Gandalf and Magneto, and Judi Dench is M. John Hurt was Quentin Crisp and the Elephant Man and Winston Smith and Ollivander and Professor Broom and the Doctor and the villain from V for Vendetta and the dragon from Merlin and the first to die in Alien. For forty years, pop culture was his career.
At seventy-seven, Hurt’s loss feels crueller than it might have done—perhaps because like many of his roles, he seemed ageless. In The Naked Civil Servant, Hurt, thirty-five, portrays Crisp at every age from nineteen to sixty-six, and somehow it never feels off; in Alien, four years later, he has the air of someone fifty-plus. Conversely, his more recent parts were old men with young souls. There was a nod to that in Doctor Who, and he’d have been better cast as Dumbledore than Ollivander.
I always got the sense Hurt was the sort of actor who worried about jobs drying up—certainly I never pictured him retiring. Long after becoming a household name, he still took on parts without needing to, and many of the roles he accepted were in smaller productions that were lucky to get him. Teatime family programmes on the BBC, fanmade Doctor Who plays, radio dramas, animated films—it wouldn’t surprise me if some of those things only got made because he said yes to them.
On casting Alien, Ridley Scott looked for actors he wouldn’t have to instruct. Hurt’s performance—wolfing down food, coughing and convulsing—is why the chestburster scene works, and it’s hard to see an RSC actor like Dench or McKellen achieving the same. Where his contemporaries approached roles cerebrally, Hurt was a flesh-and-blood actor, and many of his best remembered scenes show his body under attack, from the street violence in Civil Servant to Winston’s interrogation and all of The Elephant Man.
John Hurt’s acting helped to make pulp fiction legitimate. Long before Patrick Stewart did Star Trek or McKellen starred in X-Men—before critics thought genre films had cultural value—Hurt took roles in science fiction, horror and fantasy (among others, Aragorn in the animated Lord of the Rings film). The attention those projects attracted helped lay foundations for the rise of geek culture, and he appeared in Hellboy when comic book films were still a novelty—again, before the world got hooked on them.
What does it say that someone who played space truckers and Tolkien heroes in the seventies also brought Quentin Crisp to prominence? Perhaps that Hurt was an actor who told the stories he thought should be told, with no thought paid to bigotry or snobbery. He meant a lot to me because of that, and while his death leaves a significant hole in the world, he also leaves behind much to treasure. Literati and anoraks alike will mourn John Hurt, but the movies we keep rewatching are his legacy.
