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'John Vincent Hurt' CBE (born January 22, 1940) is an Academy Award-nominated and BAFTA Award-winning English actor. He is one of Britain's best-known, most prolific and sought after character actors, and has had a versatile career spanning over 40 years. He is highly respected for his many Shakespearean roles.

Contents

Biography

Personal life

Career

Filmography

References

External links

Biography

Personal life

John Hurt was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire to Phyllis (Massey), an amateur actress and engineer, and Arnould Herbert Hurt, a mathematician who became an Anglican clergyman.^[1] John had an older brother, Michael, and an adopted sister, Monica. His father Arnould had been a vicar at St. John in Sunderland, and had then (in 1937) moved to Derbyshire, becoming the Perpetual Curate of Holy Trinity church. When John was five, his father became the vicar of St Stephen at Woodville in South Derbyshire, remaining there until 1953.
John had a strict childhood. The family lived opposite a cinema, but he was not allowed to go there. He was not allowed to mix with local children because in his parents' view they were 'too common', and was sent to the Anglo-Catholic St Michaels prep school at Sevenoaks in Kent when he was eight. While there, John decided to become an actor, at the age of nine. His first role was that of a girl in a school play, ''The Bluebird'' (L'Oiseau Bleu) by the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck.
His father Arnould moved next to St Aidan church in New Cleethorpes, and John was sent to board at Christ's Hospital School (then a grammar school) in Lincoln, because he had failed the entrance exam to get into his older brother's school. He would often go with his mother on Tuesday nights to Cleethorpes Repertory theatre. His parents did not like the idea of him wanting to be an actor, and encouraged him to be an art teacher instead. His headmaster, Mr Franklin, laughed when John told him he wanted to be an actor, saying 'you wouldn't stand a chance in the profession'. At the age of 17, John went to Grimsby Art School (now the East Coast School of Art & Design), where he studied art.
In 1959, John won a scholarship to study for an Art Teachers Diploma (ATD) at Central St Martins College in Holborn, London. It was financially difficult for him, and he had to support himself by persuading some of his friends to pose nude for him, and selling the portraits. In 1960, he won a scholarship to RADA, where he trained for two years, He now found small roles on TV, and began to watch many films being shown at Camden Polytechnic.
In 1962, Arnould left his parish in Cleethorpes to become headmaster of St Michael's College in Belize, Latin America. Monica went to teach in Australia, and Michael (who went to the University of Cambridge) became a Catholic monk. In that year John first performed on the London stage, and also got married for the first time, to the actress Annette Robertson, because she had claimed to be pregnant. The marriage ended in 1964, after just eighteen months, when the pregnancy proved to be false. At that time John performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company; he also entered on many years as an alcoholic, though he has since rid himself of his addiction.. In 1967 he began his longest relationship, which was with the French model Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot and lasted fifteen years, ended by her untimely death in a riding accident on 26 January 1983.
After that, John Hurt was married for six years, from 6th September 1984, to the Texan actress Donna Peacock, who was a friend of his (they met in a California bar). He had proposed to her the day before at Freddie Mercury's 38th birthday party in the Xenon nightclub in London, and they married at a local register office. They moved to Kenya, and tried to have children through IVF. They divorced in early January 1990. Soon after that (on 24 January 1990), John Hurt married the American film production assistant Jo Dalton, whom he had met when filming ''Scandal''. With her, he had two sons: Alexander John Vincent (born 6 February 1990) and Nicholas Dalton (born 5 February 1993). This marriage ended in 1996 because Jo had an affair with a gardener, Arthur Shackleton, when Hurt briefly went back to Donna Peacock in Kenya. During that marriage breakdown, Hurt's drinking had also been a problem.
Another recent partner was Sarah Owen, who was twenty years younger than him and with whom he lived in County Wicklow, Ireland. He often liked drinking Guinness. In March 2005, he married the advertising film producer Ann Rees Meyers.
John's mother had died in 1975, but his father died only in November 1999, at the age of 95.
In January 2002, John Hurt received an honorary degree from the University of Derby, and in January 2006 he received an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Hull. Hurt has been married four times.

Career

Hurt's first film was 1962's ''The Wild and the Willing'', but his first major role was as Richard Rich in 1966's ''A Man for All Seasons''. However, it was his portrayal of the outrageous Quentin Crisp in the 1975 TV play, ''The Naked Civil Servant'', that shot him to fame, earning the British Academy Television Award for Best Actor in the process. The following year, Hurt portrayed the infamous Roman emperor Caligula in the major BBC drama serial, ''I, Claudius''. In 1978 John appeared in Midnight Express, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He subsequently developed a successful film career, with his best known roles including Kane, the memorable first victim of the title creature in the film ''Alien'' (a role which he reprised as a parody in ''Spaceballs''), would-be art school radical Scrawdyke in ''Little Malcolm'' and as "John" Merrick in the Joseph Merrick biography ''The Elephant Man'', for which he won a Bafta and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor.. He also had a starring role in Sam Peckinpah's critically panned but hugely successful final film, ''The Osterman Weekend'' (1983).
Throughout his career, Hurt has also played roles in famous political allegory stories that sharply contrast themselves, with him first playing the hero in an early production and then the tyrannical villain in a later work. For instance, he has played Winston Smith in the 1984 adaptation of the novel ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' and assumed the role of a Big Brother-esque leader of a fascist Great Britain in the 2006 film ''V for Vendetta'', a movie which draws many parallels to the world of Orwell's 1984. In a similar parallel, Hurt played Hazel, the heroic rabbit leader of his warren in the film adaptation of ''Watership Down'' and later played the major villain, General Woundwort, in the animated television series.
In 1986, Hurt provided the voiceover for , a public-information film warning of the dangers of AIDS. He was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in June 2004. In June 2007, he was cast in Steven Spielberg's ''Indiana Jones 4''.

Filmography

★ ''A Man for All Seasons'' (1966)

★ ''In Search of Gregory'' (1967?)

★ ''10 Rillington Place'' (1969)

★ ''Sinful Davey'' (1969)

★ ''Mr. Forbush and the Penguins'' (1971)

★ '' Little Malcolm (and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs)'' (1974)

★ "The Ghoul" (1975)

★ ''The Naked Civil Servant'' (1975) (TV)

★ ''Spectre'' (1976)

★ ''I, Claudius'' (1977) (miniseries)

★ ''Watership Down'' (1978) (voice)

★ ''Midnight Express'' (1978) (nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor)

★ ''The Lord of the Rings'' (1978) (voice)

★ ''Alien'' (1979)

★ ''The Elephant Man'' (1980) (nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, won BAFTA for best actor)

★ ''Heaven's Gate'' (1980)

★ '' (1981)

★ ''Night Crossing'' (1981)

★ ''The Plague Dogs'' (1982) (voice)

★ ''Partners'' (1982)

★ ''The Osterman Weekend'' (1983)

★ ''King Lear'' (1984) (TV), with Lord Laurence Olivier as Lear

★ ''The Hit'' (1984)

★ ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' (1984), with Richard Burton

★ ''Champions'' (1984)

★ ''The Black Cauldron'' (1985) (voice)

★ ''Aria'' (1986)

★ ''White Mischief'' (1987)

★ ''Spaceballs'' (1987)

★ ''The Jim Henson Hour'' (1989) (TV series)

★ ''Scandal'' (1989)

★ ''Frankenstein Unbound'' (1990)

★ ''The Field'' (1990)

★ ''King Ralph'' (1991)

★ ''Six Characters in Search of an Author'' (1992) (TV)

★ ''Even Cowgirls Get the Blues'' (1993)

★ ''Thumbelina'' (1994)

★ ''Second Best'' (1994)

★ ''Rob Roy'' (1995)

★ ''Dead Man'' (1995)

★ ''Love and Death on Long Island'' (1997)

★ ''Contact'' (1997)

★ ''All the Little Animals'' (1998)

★ ''The Climb'' (1998)

★ ''The Tigger Movie'' (2000) (voice)

★ ''Captain Corelli's Mandolin'' (2001)

★ ''Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'' (2001)

★ ''Crime and Punishment'' (2002)

★ ''Owning Mahowny'' (2003)

★ ''Dogville'' (2003) (voice)

★ ''The Alan Clark Diaries'' (2004)

★ ''Hellboy'' (2004)

★ ''Pride'' (2004) (TV) (voice)

★ ''Valiant'' (2005) (voice)

★ ''Manderlay'' (2005) (TV)

★ ''The Proposition'' (2005)

★ ''The Skeleton Key'' (2005)

★ ''Shooting Dogs'' (2005)

★ ''V for Vendetta'' (2006)

★ '' (2006)

★ ''The Oxford Murders'' (2007)

★ ''Outlander'' (2007)

★ ''Indiana Jones 4'' (2008)

References

1. http://www.filmreference.com/film/43/John-Hurt.html

External links

★

★ Actor's Compendium

★ Biography on BBC site

★ Receiving his honorary degree from Hull University in January 2006

★ March 2006 Observer article