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| Birth Name(s) : John Hurt |
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Full John Hurt Biography
John Vincent Hurt CBE (born 22 January 1940) is an Academy Award-nominated and BAFTA Award-winning English actor. He is one of England'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.
Hurt was born in Shirebrook near Chesterfield, Derbyshire to Phyllis (née Massey), an amateur actor and engineer, and Arnould Herbert Hurt, a mathematician who became an Anglican clergyman. John has an older brother, Michael, a monk based in Ireland, and an adopted sister, Monica. His father, Arnould, was a vicar at St. John in Sunderland, but in 1937 he moved his family to Derbyshire, where he became Perpetual Curate of Holy Trinity church. When John was five, Arnould became the vicar of St Stephen at Woodville in South Derbyshire and remained there until 1953.
Hurt had a strict upbringing. The family lived opposite a cinema, but he was not allowed to see films. He was also not permitted to mix with local children because, in his parents' view, they were 'too common'. At the age of eight, he was sent to the Anglo-Catholic St Michaels prep school at Sevenoaks in Kent, and while there, he decided to become an actor. His first role was that of a girl in a school play, The Bluebird (L'Oiseau Bleu) by the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck.
In 1959, Hurt won a scholarship allowing him to study for an Art Teachers Diploma (ATD) at Central St Martins College in Holborn, London. Despite the scholarship, paying for his studies was financially difficult, so he persuaded some of his friends to pose nude and sold the portraits. In 1960, however, he won a scholarship to RADA, where he trained for two years. He was then cast in small roles on TV.
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 had attended Cambridge University) became a Catholic monk. In that same year, Hurt first performed on the London stage and also married for the first time, to the actress Annette Robertson, because she had claimed to be pregnant. The marriage ended in 1964, after eighteen months, since the pregnancy had proved to be false. At that time, Hurt was performing with the Royal Shakespeare Company; he was also entering on many years as an alcoholic, though he has since rid himself of his addiction.. In 1967, he began his longest relationship, with the French model Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot. It lasted fifteen years and ended with her untimely death in a riding accident on 26 January 1983.
Soon afterwards, (on 24 January 1990), Hurt married an American production assistant, Jo Dalton, whom he had met while 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 returned to Donna Peacock in Kenya. Hurt's drinking had also been a problem.
Another partner was Sarah Owen, twenty years younger than Hurt, with whom he lived in County Wicklow, Ireland. In March of 2005, Hurt married his fourth wife, the advertising film producer Ann Rees Meyers.
Hurt's mother died in 1975, and his father lived until November of 1999, when he died at the age of 95.
In January of 2002, John Hurt received an honorary degree from the University of Derby, and in January 2006 he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Hull.
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 him 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, Hurt 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 "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). Hurt also appeared as Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment in the BBC series of that name in 1980.
Hurt has also taken roles in famous political allegories, first playing the hero in an early production and then the tyrannical villain in a later work. For instance, he played Winston Smith in the 1984 adaptation of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and then assumed the role of a Big Brother-esque leader of a fascist Great Britain in the 2006 film V for Vendetta, a movie that drew many parallels to the world of Orwell's 1984. Similarly, 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. |
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