Kevin Maher
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John Hurt is lost for words. The 68-year-old screen legend, former bon viveur and craggy force of nature is here to talk about his role in the new Indiana Jones movie, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. There’s just one problem: he’s not allowed to talk about his role in the movie. The secrecy machine of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas (the franchise creators) has dictated that he can reveal nothing about the movie, other than how much he enjoyed making it. “I don’t suppose we could talk about the lack of enjoyment in making it?” he asks, with an irreverent schoolboy giggle.
Hurt is an inveterate talker and raconteur. So the tension between his garrulous instincts and his willingness to honour the embargo is obvious. “Harrison Ford does all his own fights,” he begins. “And I should know, I was in one of them.” He stops himself, suddenly realising that a plot revelation is spiralling out before him.
He plays Professor Oxley, a colleague of Indiana Jones, and one who is involved, apparently, in a search for the magically endowed Mesoamerican crystal skull of the title. Hurt’s slip implies that he is actually a villain, perhaps even the villain. “Or then again, was I involved in a fight with him?” he says, eyebrows raised. “It’s possible that I just watched.”
Speaking about Ford, Hurt describes how the self-deprecating megastar, after an impressive piece of stunt driving, had turned to him and sighed: “Well, you don’t think they employ me to act, did you John?”
And, despite the hysteria surrounding the movie (18 years in the making), Hurt says he refused to sign up to appear without first reading a script. “It turned out to be rather an expensive read,” he says. “It had to be hand-delivered from Hollywood. A courier dropped it off at three and picked it up at eight. He was probably outside with an eye on the front door during that time.” He gives a disdainful shrug. “It’s cops and robbers stuff. And it’s all to make Mr Lucas an extra billion, as if he needs it.”
Hurt’s casual cynicism is a refreshing counterpoise to a movie world that’s increasingly obsessed with brand identities and corporate edicts. Yet it’s also typical of a debonair iconoclast who’s lived a dozen wild lives in places as disparate as Kenya and Co Wicklow, who has married four times and survived the booze-sodden excess of London café society to maintain a screen career that has lasted for more than 40 years. Here his very survival is his legacy; his tenacity and endurance his crown.
And yet you also sense the frustration. He burst on to the screen in 1975, with a Bafta-winning role as Quentin Crisp, the self-described “stately homo of England” in the ground-breaking TV movie, The Naked Civil Servant. The role, a delicate portrait of steely dignity in the face of brutal mob rule, was a revelation. “That was my break,” he says. “Some said it would ruin my career, but it made everything possible.”
Crisp himself would refer to the actor as “my representative here on Earth”, while Hurt says that his relationship with Crisp (who died in 1999) is sweetly circular, as he is now preparing to shoot An Englishman in New York, the long-awaited Civil Servant follow-up, which deals with Crisp’s later life in Manhattan. “I shall play him with slightly more cynicism,” he says, voice rising to a reedy half-whisper. “More thoughtful this time.”
Hurt adds that he has always been comfortable with his own sexuality, and with playing gay characters, from Ryan O’Neal’s lover in Partners (1982) to the elderly lovelorn academic in Love and Death on Long Island (1997). “It’s a big deal for some actors, and for some people,” he says. “But I understand it. I was away at school, you know?”
He pauses after he says this. In the pause there live the well-docu-mented stories of pressure-cooker sexuality and headmasterly abuse at Hurt’s prep school in Kent. “So, of course, I understand it.” Another silence. For six seconds this time, while his sad sloping eyes stare out of the window. “I understand it.”
Hurt escaped from school with a painting scholarship to Central St Martins in London. The son of a disciplinarian vicar, he had grown up in Derbyshire. His acting career was kick-started, typically, by an attractive Australian girl whom he met at a London party in 1960, and who, impressed by his gags and impressions, convinced him to audition for RADA. Hurt was accepted, and the roles followed – most notably as Richard Rich in A Man For All Seasons (1966) – as did the parties.
He went superstratospheric in 1979, with a triumvirate of attention-grabbing roles – as a heroin addict in Midnight Express, a gore-spattered astronaut in Alien and a freak-show romantic in The Elephant Man – that convinced the movie world that a virtuoso performer was in its midst. Rave reviews and commercial success were accompanied by industry-wide adulation. The producer David Puttnam waxed lyrical about Hurt’s extraordinary eyes, and his ability to convey sadness. The director David Lynch went farther, announcing that “John Hurt is the greatest actor in the world”.
Hurt, however, never truly capitalised on his banner year. In fact his 1980s more often included turkeys such as Jake Speed and Spaceballs than gems such as 1984. He says the reason is to do with the industry. “When you’re new and you do Midnight Express, Elephant Man and Alien virtually together, nothing else is going to touch it,” he says. “And because they’re such different roles producers, who have never been my friends, don’t know how to cast you. They say, ‘But this new part is not like Midnight Express.’ And you say, ‘But Elephant Man was not like Midnight Express!’ ”
And still, despite a later return to form in movies as diverse as Scandal (1989), Dead Man (1995) and Love and Death on Long Island, there’s that sense, perhaps never far from the surface, that he was the next Brando, the next Olivier, the next Day-Lewis in waiting. No?
“Oh God, yes, there are moments where you say, ‘Wouldn’t it have been nice?’ Look at Daniel Day-Lewis, he’s handled himself very well. He keeps retiring. I wish I’d thought of that!” He corrects his cattier instincts. “No, I know Danny well, and he’s very amusing. But he certainly has a very cute understanding of the game. And he’s got them eating out of his hand.”
Did personal reasons underlie Hurt’s slump? (In 1983 his soul-mate of 16 years, the French model Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot, fell from her horse while out riding with Hurt, and died.) “It was a horrendous time,” he says, staring downwards. “Like all the earth in front of you was just dug up and heaving. It had a profound effect on my life. It’s very difficult to say, ‘Well, this was post-Marie-Lise, and this pre-Marie-Lise.’ I don’t think it’s that black and white.”
The roles continued to flow, as did the booze. “I wasn’t like Oliver Reed,” he says, correcting a common misconception. “He was a competitive drinker. He’d say, ‘I can drink you under the f***ing table.’ And I’d say: ‘I’m sure you could, Oliver. But where’s the fun in that?’ ”
And all the while there was the real Hurt underneath, the razor-sharp virtuoso, channelling his pain on to the screen. He’d pop up, say, as the vagabond in All the Little Animals (1998), or as the righteous vicar in Shooting Dogs (2005), just to flex his thesp muscles effortlessly and show us what real acting is all about. Then it was back to the vicissitudes of what Puttnam called Hurt’s “extraordinary life”.
These days, of course, he is a reformed character. He’s been dry for four years, he says (remarkably, he gave up alcohol not because of health threats but because he simply lost interest in it).
Hurt has had three wives since Marie-Lise. He lived with one, Donna Peacock, on an estate in Kenya, and with another, Jo Dalton, in a Georgian farmhouse in Ireland. “I have done all sorts of extraordinary things, I know,” he says. “At the time I didn’t think anything of it. But when you look back you think, ‘Jesus Christ!’ ” Yes, but would he live it again? “No thank you. I’m with Beckett there. It’s not good enough to die. One has to be forgotten.”
Hurt, less tormented and more productive, lives now in Central London with his fourth wife, the commercials director Anwen Rees-Meyers, who is 25 years his junior.
He boasts a startling nine forthcoming movies, including the blockbuster Hellboy 2 and the Britflick 44 Inch Chest (opposite Ray Winstone) and, of course, Indiana Jones.
Speaking of which, I suggest a game. I’ll run plot points (gleaned from the internet and beyond) by him, and will judge their validity, or not, by his reactions. There’s more than one Crystal Skull? “Hmmm, interesting,” he says. Your character comes back from the dead? “He’d be called Lazarus, wouldn’t he?! There’s a cameo from the Elephant Man? “Depends on how you look at it.” And, finally, with Crisp in mind, you have a homosexual relationship with Indiana Jones. “I wish!” he says, before sneering: “Oh yes, Lucas would really dare to put something like that in!”
Interview over. The publicist enters. “I told him everything,” he says, grinning. “I let the whole thing out of the bag.” Then he stands up and leaves, still chortling, still slyly and irrepressibly Hurt.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is released on May 22 2008
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Mr W Jones, Liverpool,
An 'English' community in an Anglo-Saxon country like America would be redundant.
T. J. Cassidy, Arlington, Virginia, U.S.A.
Oh stop moaning. I bet the English actors aren't.
john, Liverpool, U.K.
English people are the bad guy for one reason, there is no English american comunity. There for, there are no letters of complants about "our" people being the bad guy all the time, unlike the "german americans" who did with die hard, hence no more german bad guys, only enlgish one's.
Mr W Jones, Liverpool, England
English actors just make better bad guys. The English accent always sounds better for a villain.
Graham , Leeds,
Yes it would not surprise me that an English actor would be cast as the bad guy again and not for the first time in Hollywood, it makes you wonder if Hollywood directors have an anti English agenda where the English guy always comes off worst.
Alfie Bass, N Abbot, England