Making Us Fly

Many elements have contributed to the success of actor John Hurt but central to his craft is an ability to avoid typecasting by endlessly reinventing himself. There are many contradictions; his voice and face are distinctive yet this has never limited his choice of role. As he says himself; "I'm a director's actor - producers never seem to know what to do with me." Even so, he is not confined to arthouse films and has appeared in commercial cinema.

His quality as a performer suggests he is essentially a stage actor but Hurt stresses his work is in film. Unlike many actors, he will not dismiss cinema as temporary exile from theatre. He believes in the form - "at its best it is an exciting medium possessing limitless possibilities". His latest film, debut-director Richard Kwietniowski's Love And Death On Long Island, opens here this month. Based on Gilbert Adair's screenplay of his novel of the same title, the film tells the story of writer Giles de'Ath's surprise obsession with a young actor played by Beverly Hills 90210 star Jason Priestly. In ways a less profound variation of Lolita, the film is a vehicle for Hurt's humour and he is satisfied. "It's the best work I've done in 10 years." The story itself is slight, its appeal lies in the fastidious attention to detail which de'Arth, a consummate snob, lavishes on his proposed seduction on the not overly bright teenage pin up. Meanwhile, he has completed shooting on Aodhan Madden's Night Train. Directed by the Irish film-maker John Lynch, the film was shot in Ireland and Venice, and Hurt co-stars with Brenda Blethyn. He is about to begin filming You're Dead in Germany.

As he has lived in this country for the past eight years, many feel they now know John Hurt the man as well - or even better - than John Hurt the actor. He has been married three times and has two children. Becoming a father for the first time at 50, was, he says, "wonderful". He seems to be sociable, although he qualifies this by saying "sometimes I'm quiet, sometimes I'm not".

The diversity of his range is illustrated by his film credits, from The Elephant Man to Alien and Scandal, to The Field. Hurt portrayed Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant (1975), for which he won an Emmy award, before before dominating the outstanding BBC adaption of Robert Graves's I, Claudius with his magnificently repellent Caligua. On stage, he appeared as Mick in the first revival of Pinter's The Caretaker, in 1972, having previously won the Critics' Award in 1963 for his performance in another Pinter play, The Dwarfs. He played Tristan Tzara in the premiere of Tom Stoppard's Travesties (1973). Last seen on the Dublin stage in 1991 playing Count Mushroom, a Restoration rake, in The Lon- don Vertigo, Brian Friel's adaptation of Macklin's The True-Born Irishman, Hurt returned to London theatre three years later in a production of A Month In the Country at the Albery. "The only Shakespeare I've done is the Fool to Olivier's Lear - and I was Romeo": he adds that he was happier in the later stages of the play, "when he becomes more like Hamlet".

Guilt and bewilderment are but two of the many expressions Hurt conjures in multiple variations of his interpretation of character. With his small, deep set, almost Slavic brown eyes, it could be argued he possesses the haunted face of a Raskolnikov - a role which he in fact played in a television version of Crime And Punishment in 1979. It is a versatile face, equally suited to villains and saints; misfits and losers and witnesses. Many of the characters he plays are marginalised. He disputes this, but Hurt has consistently portrayed characters who are brutalised, usually for being different - consider Quentin Crisp and John Merrick, his Elephant Man. Both are treated as freaks. Interestingly, their respective experiences provide shocking insights spanning some 100 years of English attitudes towards outsiders. He approaches interviews with equal measures of candour and caution: his intelligence and natural recklessness have often been at war. "I don't like talking about myself," he says and he is far more comfortable discussing theatre and movies than his own life and times. Reading has become more important to him over the years and he says he loves going to theatre, "when it is at its best, something special does happen". His critical judgements are shrewd and considered, and if he has not seen a play or movie he will not speculate - "there's not much point in that, is there?" Hurt seems to have been destined for an actor's life from an early age: he impressed his classmates with his clowning. His boyhood is difficult to place as he says, "it seemed to happen all over. We moved many times and I did go to boarding school." Born in Chesterfield in 1940, he is the younger son of Rev Arnould Hurt. "My father was high church - I don't know how well you know the workings of Anglicanism? - but we were very high. He moved parish about every seven years. He is 94 now." Sure enough, while his voice is certainly melodious, Hurt's accent has traces of several areas. He cannot point to a particular home in England - "you see, I'm not really from anywhere".

Ironically, the overall impression is of class and of an expensive education. The observation makes him laugh, while the bald social significance of such realities also irritate him. "England is the only country in the world which produces an accent which comes from nowhere in particular but automatically means class and education." He says it has proved professionally useful for him. "Mine is really a family voice; I speak just like my father." The Rev Hurt was also, according to his son, a good performer in the pulpit.

St Michael's prep school, in Sevenoaks, Kent, left Hurt with few happy memories - other than the enjoyment of entertaining his classmates. He did not shine at school and was not interested in following his older brother to Cambridge. There was little point in deciding then that he wanted to be an actor. After all, it was not quite respectable and he was a vicar's son.

On leaving the Lincoln School in Lincoln, he studied art and arrived at Grimsby School of Art in 1957. He stayed there for two years, before moving to St Martin's School of Art in London where he studied for a further two years. While a student, he became friendly with two Australian girls who were working in a local Wimpy. They were also training as Spanish dancers, having become groupies tagging along behind a Spanish dance band which had been touring Australia. The girls were invited to a party. They brought Hurt. During the evening, he started fooling about. "Someone suggested `you should be an actor'. It was exactly what I wanted to hear." Auditioning for a place at the Royal Academy of Arts was the next step. He was accepted. In 1962 he appeared in his first film, The Wild And The Willing. Less than four years later, he got the definitive big break when he was cast in Fred Zinnemann's epic version of Robert Bolt's A Man For All Seasons. He still has regard for the movie. "I was very lucky. It was a fantastic cast: Paul Scofield, Robert Shaw, Wendy Hiller, Orson Welles, Colin Blakely - they were all in it. It was a wonderful chance for me." The part of Richard Rich, the ambitious servant who betrays his master Thomas More, gave an early indiction of Hurt's ability to create an ambiguous quality of vulnerable ruthlessness which he would later capture so brilliantly in his portrayal of Stephen Ward in Scandal, one of his finest performances to date. In 1965 Hurt visited Dublin for the first time, arriving here to appear in Little Malcolm And The Eunuchs in that year's Dublin Theatre Festival. "I know it sounds terribly hackneyed, but from the moment I arrived here I felt I had come home. I've always loved Ireland and, well, to prove that I've been coming over ever since. In fact I've lived here for the past eight years." His initial liking for Ireland was consolidated by his experience of filming John Huston's Sinful Davy here in 1968. Set in early 19thcentury Scotland, Sinful Davy is a likable yarn about a young deserter who becomes an inept highwayman. Death comes in the form of a golf ball. Hurt's lead is an engaging Artful Dodger. "It was great fun, I have to say, I enjoy my work - most of the time. Although there have been moments." More films quickly followed and in 1970 he played the hapless and illiterate young Welshman, Evans, to Richard Attenborough's Christie in 10 Rillington Place. A gripping piece of British post-war melodrama, the part revealed yet another side to Hurt the actor. Watching it now, one is struck by how boyish he still looked at 30. During the intervening 28 years, however, life and his calendar age have certainly caught up with him. "I'm glad to have survived. There were times when I didn't think I'd see 30. I did look young for a long time. The last time I was asked to prove my age in a pub was when I was 27." A slight man, in the past he has been a heavy drinker and he remains a dedicated smoker.

Alien showed that Hurt was not immune to the lure of commercial cinema and he agrees: "A movie like that is not about acting, it's about special effects, all very brilliantly done. The actors have to take a back seat."

By the time he was nominated as best supporting actor for the role of Max, the doomed, hippie drugaddict rotting in a Turkish jail in Alan Parker's harrowing Midnight Express (1978), Hurt was already famous in Britain and the US as a result of the success of The Naked Civil Servant and I, Claudius. Quentin Crisp, Hurt says, is the most impressive individual he has met. "I think he is unique. He is also an oblique philosopher. He is the only person I've known who lives by his own philosophy. He is also the most courageous, most honest, most humane person. It was great to finally get that bloody project done. Remember, it was the 1970s, homosexuality was a far harder subject to tackle then, than it is now." Lapsing into his Quentin voice, Hurt recreates the moment when Crisp was asked what he thought of Hurt's portrayal of him. "Mr Hurt," said Crisp, "is my representative here on earth."

Two movies released in 1980 had vastly contrasting consequences. The Elephant Man, David Lynch's masterpiece, assembled a strong cast including Anthony Hopkins, Wendy Hiller and John Gielgud. Hurt's moving performance as John Merrick earned him an Oscar Best Actor nomination. The part was physically demanding. Also, for an actor whose face is so expressive, the grotesque make-up left him almost completely dependent on his voice, which was also distorted by the large headpieces. Lynch's evocative, intimate film, beautifully shot in black and white, seems light years removed from Michael Cimino's bloated epic Heaven's Gate. At the mention of that film, Hurt's face registers some misgivings. Earlier, when asked about regrets, he had said, "regrets happen when you choose to do something else - though, of course, they are also caused by mistakes - but Heaven's Gate is one of those films that you know could have been much better. Cimino had set out to make the `biggest, most expensive best movie ever' and, well" - he pauses - "he didn't. I think it was because it ran away from him."

Hurt makes it clear he is not speaking with hindsight. "I made my feelings known at the time." As for the character he played - Billy Irvine, a clever youth who fails to deliver on his early promise and who slides into alcoholic cynicism - Hurt remarks with studied irony, "you know, I never quite figure out what that character was doing in that film. There he is, giving the college address and then, 20 years on, he is drinking himself to death in the wilderness. What I want to know is how he got there. Heaven's Gate has no central thesis." For all its weaknesses, that film also remains important because of the negative reaction of the US public to the narrative, however sprawling. "While I accept there is such a thing as poetic licence, I don't understand how someone can take historical facts, twists them into fiction and then present it as a historical film." Ultimately, Irvine becomes the chorus, a lone witness for the collapse of morality. Possibly the finest performance Hurt has yet given is as Winston Smith in Michael Radford's superb film adaptation of George Orwell's prophetic classic 1984. Hurt captures Smith's wistful longing for truth and decency. It is a brilliant film and the most underrated one in which he has appeared. It also includes the late Richard Burton as O'Brien, in possibly his finest film appearance. Hurt smiles as he recalls the poor response it had in the US. "I think some 500 Academy members walked out.

"I've always loved Orwell. He was the first serious writer I ever read. I first read that book when I was 16 - I read all his novels and most of the journalism." Most ironic of all is the fact that his portrayal of the battered Winston Smith is the closest Hurt has been to being a romantic hero.

Scandal in 1988 explored the story behind the revelations which became known as the Profumo Affair. Hurt's Stephen Ward is a convincing portrayal of a hedonistic, unabashedly sleazy social animal who is also capable of kindness. The performance has been deservedly praised. The indiscreet Ward paid a heavy price for his fun. Disgraced publicly and abandoned by his well-connected political and society friends, he committed suicide. Ward's habit of sketching his friends was an easy one for Hurt to identify with - he did his own sketches for the movie. In his private life he continues to paint, mainly figurative subjects and landscapes. "Not so much in oil now, I'm not a colourist. I paint fast - I like to use acrylics." In 1990 Hurt played Birdy, the cunning village idiot in Jim Sheridan's version of J.B. Keane's The Field. Ask any actor to explain their motivations and the standard replies usually include insecurity and a desire or even perhaps a pressing need to be someone else. Hurt's reply is surprisingly simple. "I enjoy it. It's what do." How does a character develop? Where does it come from? "From observing - although I don't spend much time deliberately watching people. It comes from the imagination. From things you have seen. And of course," he laughs, "from your own life experience." British acting has maintained a high standard. "I believe good acting comes from good writing. We've good writers."

As for film scripts, he says he tends to look more towards Europe than America. "I also am a supporter of independent film making. Studios are in pursuit of the formula that sells; independents are interested in the unique."

What is so special about a life in movies? "It's the power to create a reality, make it become part of our experience. It's about imagination and I suppose - without I hope sounding too pretentious or foolish - it's about engaging the audience's emotions and imagination. Maybe even helping them to fly a little."