John Hurt

The man who died better than anyone

John Hurt never sought beauty in his characters. He had a face that looked like a map of minor roads and a voice that sounded like old tobacco. In 1962, he landed his first role in The Wild and the Willing after training at the RADA in London. But his big break did not come from his looks but from his ability to embody the suffering of others.

In 1975, he played Quentin Crisp in the television production The Naked Civil Servant. It was a risky role for the time because of its gay themes. But Hurt decided he would not hide behind the prejudices of the British public. That performance earned him his first BAFTA and pulled him out of the complete obscurity he had lived in.

And the risk paid off.

During the filming of Alien in 1979, the crew used real butcher's offal for the chest scene. Ridley Scott did not tell the rest of the cast exactly what was going to happen. Hurt became the center of a sequence that changed how mainstream cinema portrayed biological horror. That moment brought him worldwide fame, which he always handled with a certain cynical detachment.

The torment behind the mask

In 1980, he took on the challenge of playing Joseph Merrick in The Elephant Man. David Lynch was looking for someone who could convey humanity through suffocating layers of latex. Hurt spent seven hours a day sitting in the makeup chair before starting work. He could not lie down to rest because the weight of the prosthetics on his head was dangerous for his neck.

That performance earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. But he lost to Robert De Niro and his physical transformation in Raging Bull. Despite the defeat, the industry understood that Hurt could carry an entire film with just a look. His Winston Smith in the adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, shot in 1984, confirmed he was the ideal actor for characters defeated by the system.

The industry never typecast him.

In 1978, he voiced Aragorn in Ralph Bakshi's animated version of The Lord of the Rings. He was a tireless worker who never looked down on popular genres or low-budget cinema. That is why he agreed to join the Harry Potter saga from 2001 on, playing wandmaker Garrick Ollivander. For new generations, Hurt was not a 1960s method actor but the man who handed the young wizard his wand.

A refuge in voice and in the ending

His work pace did not slow down with age. In 2013, he joined the world of Doctor Who to play a forgotten incarnation of the lead in the fiftieth anniversary special. His face became familiar to an audience that had not even been born when he was already a star in the UK. He amassed more than 200 credits across film, television and voice work.

In 2015, he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his services to dramatic arts. That same year he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which did not stop him from accepting scripts. He kept working because he didn't know how to do anything else, and because the camera still found nuances in his wrinkles that younger actors could not fake.

John Hurt died in January 2017 at his home in Norfolk. He was 77 years old.

His last appearance was in Damascus Cover, a espionage thriller shot in 2015 in which he played an intelligence chief named Miki.