John Hurt

Over the last year or so, it’s felt like every other episode of Moviehouse could have been a memorial for one departed member of the filmmaking world or another. Maybe it’s just been a long string of bad timing, maybe it’s the baby boomer generation getting older, maybe the gods of filmmaking wanted a terrific softball team up in movie heaven. Whatever it is, it’s been kind of a heavy year and I had decided not to do another memorial show for a while. But then John Hurt dies, and there wasn’t any way I could let that go without some comment.  

  

You may know him as Garrick Olivander, the wandmaker who gives Harry Potter his first wand or perhaps you saw him in his Oscar nominated role as Max the imprisoned heroin addict in Midnight Express. He was the rebellious Winston Smith in the original dystopia, 1984, and he was a Hitler-like fascist leader in V for Vendetta over twenty years later.

Part of what makes John Hurt notable is his ubiquity. The guy was everywhere. He started in film in the early 1960s and worked steadily up until the time of his death in January from pancreatic cancer. Hurt was versatile, doing everything from Shakespeare to serving as the narrator for Winnie the Pooh cartoons. He easily crossed back and forth between giant blockbuster franchises like Indiana Jones and tiny independent movies no one ever saw, like his wonderful performance in 1997’s little-seen Love and Death on Long Island. 

But it’s not just that Hurt worked a lot. He was good. Really, really good. When he was a bad guy, he was forcefully evil. When he was the hero, he inspired a legitimate sympathy. He could do what great actors do – he made audiences feel. Perhaps the most distinct characteristic of his work was his voice. His accent could be cultured and aristocratic or guttural and cockney, but his voice itself always had the same quality of being simultaneously gravelly and yet smooth, youthful and yet wizened.

It’s worth noting for fans of the Alien franchise that it still going strong after nearly forty years that John Hurt played Kane, the executive officer of the ill-fated ship Nostromo, in the original 1979 film directed by Ridley Scott. Hurt’s character was the very first person in movie history to have an alien burst out of his chest in that unforgettably horrifying sequence. Hurt was nominated for a British Acting Film Award for short but indelible performance. 

My idiosyncratic personal favorite Hurt performance was in the supremely 80s legal dramedy, 1987’s From the Hip. Hurt plays Douglas Benoit, an impish but monstrously arrogant and possibly murderous university professor who hires an unorthodox lawyer played by Judd Nelson to get him off the hook for murdering a prostitute. Hurt was sly, charming, aloof, and also terrifyingly convincing as someone could possibly kill someone with a hammer.

Of course, everyone should see Hurt’s performance as John Merrick in David Lynch’s 1980 film, The Elephant Man. The whole film is a marvel of writing, cinematography, makeup, and performance, especially Hurt. In a film all about the humanity of someone who is treated so inhumanely, Hurt gave a performance of subtlety and authenticity. It could have been grandstanding or treacle, but instead was one of the great performances of all time. Director David Lynch’s claustrophobic, sometimes nightmarish production design and black and white cinematography showed a steaming, overcrowded Victorian England filled with monsters who looked human and Hurt’s John Merrick, a delicate, lovely human who looked like a monster. It’s a powerful film and it’s a fair bet, it’s not like anything else you’ve seen. 

Hurt was an actor's actor - versatile, hardworking, and from all reports, a really lovely guy to work with. He worked very, very hard over the six decades of his career, and though I am sad there will be no more John Hurt performances, he has more than earned his rest.