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John Vincent Hurt CBE (born January 22, 1940) is an Academy Award-nominated and
BAFTA Award-winning British actor. He is one of Britain'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.
 Personal
life
Hurt was born in Shirebrook near Chesterfield, Derbyshire to Phyllis (née Massey),
an amateur actress and engineer, and Arnould Herbert Hurt, a mathematician who
became an Anglican clergyman. John has an older brother, Michael, who has become a
monk based in Ireland, and an adopted sister, Monica. His father Arnould had been a
vicar at St. John in Sunderland, and had then (in 1937) moved to Derbyshire,
becoming the Perpetual Curate of Holy Trinity church. When John was five, his
father became the vicar of St Stephen at Woodville in South Derbyshire, remaining
there until 1953.
John had a strict childhood. The family lived opposite a cinema, but he was not
allowed to go there. He was not allowed to mix with local children because in his
parents' view they were 'too common', and was sent to the Anglo-Catholic St
Michaels prep school at Sevenoaks in Kent when he was eight. While there, John
decided to become an actor, at the age of nine. His first role was that of a girl
in a school play, The Bluebird (L'Oiseau Bleu) by the Belgian Maurice
Maeterlinck.
His father Arnould moved next to St Aidan church in Cleethorpes, and John was sent
to board at Christ's Hospital School (then a grammar school) in Lincoln, because he
had failed the entrance exam to get into his older brother's school. He would often
go with his mother on Tuesday nights to Cleethorpes Repertory theatre. His parents
did not like the idea of him wanting to be an actor, and encouraged him to be an
art teacher instead. His headmaster, Mr Franklin, laughed when John told him he
wanted to be an actor, saying 'you wouldn't stand a chance in the profession'. At
the age of 17, John went to Grimsby Art School (now the East Coast School of Art
& Design), where he studied art.
In 1959, John won a scholarship to study for an Art Teachers Diploma (ATD) at
Central St Martins College in Holborn, London. It was financially difficult for
him, and he had to support himself by persuading some of his friends to pose nude
for him, and selling the portraits. In 1960, he won a scholarship to RADA, where he
trained for two years, He now found small roles on TV, and began to watch many
films being shown at Camden Polytechnic.
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 went to the University of Cambridge) became a Catholic monk. In that
year John first performed on the London stage, and also got married for the first
time, to the actress Annette Robertson, because she had claimed to be pregnant. The
marriage ended in 1964, after just eighteen months, when the pregnancy proved to be
false. At that time John performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company; he also
entered on many years as an alcoholic, though he has since rid himself of his
addiction.. In 1967 he began his longest relationship, which was with the French
model Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot and lasted fifteen years, ended by her untimely
death in a riding accident on 26 January 1983.
After that, John Hurt was married for six years, from 6th September 1984, to the
Texan actress Donna Peacock, who was a friend of his (they met in a California
bar). He had proposed to her the day before at Freddie Mercury's 38th birthday
party in the Xenon nightclub in London, and they married at a local register
office. They moved to Kenya, and tried to have children through IVF. They divorced
in early January 1990. Soon after that (on 24 January 1990), John Hurt married the
American film production assistant Jo Dalton, whom he had met when 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 went back to Donna
Peacock in Kenya. During that marriage breakdown, Hurt's drinking had also been a
problem.
Another recent partner was Sarah Owen, who was twenty years younger than him and
with whom he lived in County Wicklow, Ireland. He often liked drinking Guinness. In
March 2005, he married the advertising film producer Ann Rees Meyers.
John's mother had died in 1975, but his father died only in November 1999, at the
age of 95.
In January 2002, John Hurt received an honorary degree from the University of
Derby, and in January 2006 he received an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from
the University of Hull. Hurt has been married four times.
In 2007 Hurt took part in the genealogical television series Who Do You Think You
Are?, which investigated part of his family history. Prior to participating in the
programme Hurt had harboured a love of Ireland and was enamoured with a “deeply
beguiling” family legend that suggested his great-grandmother was the illegitimate
daughter of an Irish nobleman, the Marquess of Sligo. However, the evidence Hurt
discovered seemed to contradict the family legend, making his Irish connections
doubtful. This discovery upset him as it altered his sense of identity.
Career
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 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 John 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 as "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).
Throughout his career, Hurt has also played roles in famous political allegory
stories that sharply contrast themselves, with him first playing the hero in an
early production and then the tyrannical villain in a later work. For instance, he
has played Winston Smith in the 1984 adaptation of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four
and assumed the role of a Big Brother-esque leader of a fascist Great Britain in
the 2006 film V for Vendetta, a movie which draws many parallels to the world of
Orwell's 1984. In a similar parallel, 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.
In 1986, Hurt provided the voiceover for AIDS: Iceberg / Tombstone, a
public-information film warning of the dangers of AIDS. He was made a Commander of
the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in June 2004.
In June 2007, he was cast in Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of
the Crystal Skull.
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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John
Hurt - Generator - Biography
