Love and Death on Long Island (1997)The veteran British actor Sir John Hurt has died at 77.
Known for his roles in films such as Alien (1979) and The Elephant Man (1980), Hurt was a hugely prolific and acclaimed star of film and television since the early 1960s. He won four BAFTA awards, including a lifetime achievement award, as well as a Golden Globe and two Oscar nominations. He was knighted in 2015.
Currently featuring as Father Richard McSorley in Jackie (2016), the new biopic of Jackie Kennedy, Hurt remained a constant presence on screen in his later years, with roles in blockbuster films such as the Harry Potter series, playing Mr Ollivander, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011).
Born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, in 1940, Hurt’s first film role came in the 1962 drama The Wild and the Willing, and he made early appearances on TV in series such as Z Cars and Armchair Theatre. But it was his roles as Richard Rich in A Man for All Seasons (1966) and then his BAFTA-nominated turn in true-crime drama 10 Rillington Place (1971) that brought the actor to attention.
In 1975 he won the British Academy Television Award for best actor for his performance as Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant, a role which he later reprised in 2009’s An Englishman in New York. He also played major roles in the TV miniseries I, Claudius (1976), as Caligula, and Crime and Punishment (1979), as Raskolnikov.
He won a BAFTA for best supporting actor for Alan Parker’s controversial prison drama Midnight Express (1978), which also bagged him a Golden Globe and his first Oscar nomination. Two years later, his role as John Merrick in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980) won similar plaudits: he took the BAFTA for best actor and nominations from the Oscars and Golden Globes.
Other memorable performances came as the unfortunate Kane, from whose stomach an alien erupts in a classic scene in Ridley Scott’s outer-space horror movie Alien (1979), as George Orwell’s Winston Smith in the 1984 adaptation Nineteen Eighty-four, and as the fictional writer Giles De’Ath in Love and Death on Long Island (1997).
He won a third BAFTA for Jim Sheridan’s The Field (1990), then his lifetime achievement award followed in 2015. He was awarded a BFI Fellowship in 2010.
A full appreciation of John Hurt’s life and career will follow shortly.
