Jonathan Gems, who co-wrote the scripts for 1984 and White Mischief, which both starred John Hurt, recalls the actor who died recently aged 77:
John Hurt – the perfect name for him.
John Hurt proved that God exists. Actually, I think the Creator may have slipped up here. It’s a little too obvious, too much of a hint – a wink – that the Great Screenwriter in the sky is really behind everything. How else do you explain the manifestation of a man so sublime at conveying the fragility and suffering of humanity, who is called John Hurt?
What a harvest of souls these past 12 months have been! Apart from John Hurt we lost Prince, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, George Michael, George Martin (the Beatles’ producer), Edward Albee, Peter Shaffer, the Italian playwright Dario Fo, Muhammad Ali, Arnold Palmer, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Nancy Reagan, Umberto Eco (‘The Name of the Rose,’) Harper Lee (‘To Kill A Mockingbird,’) Alan Rickman, Garry Shandling, Victoria Wood, Robert Vaughn, Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds.
When I saw the front page of the UK Daily Mirror announcing Hurt’s death at my local supermarket, I burst into tears. The whole front page was filled with John Hurt’s face. His thick grey hair was a wild mess, his expression one of confusion and despair. My God, he was human! He expressed our humanity and the pain of existence more perfectly than any actor I know.
His birds-nest of crazy hair evoked another famous photo – that of Albert Einstein, John’s equivalent in the field of physics. Make no mistake: John Hurt was a genius. Many thespians worship Marlon Brando. They should take another look at John Hurt. The difference is that – unlike Einstein and Brando – John wasn’t an attention-junkie. He never behaved like a star.
I first met him at Twickenham Studios on the set of the movie 1984. I’d done a pass on the script and the director, Michael Radford, had asked me to help him out as his assistant. I was excited to meet Hurt, whose films I’d been watching all my life. He was always amazing.
But I didn’t meet him. The person I met was someone else: Winston Smith – the protagonist of George Orwell’s 1984. Hurt, contrary to what you might have read, was a method actor.
I didn’t meet the real John until we were in post-production. And what a fantastic guy he was. Warm, funny, super-intelligent, and an awesome expert on movies, acting and filmmaking.
What I did get to see during the shoot of 1984 was how he worked. His focus was extraordinary. He had the concentration of a Tibetan lama. He became Winston Smith – a kind-hearted man hurting under a tyrannical, statist régime.
John Hurt’s achilles heel was booze and, to help portray the suffering of Winston Smith, he gave up drinking. Throughout the shoot he pushed down constant waves of craving, which read onscreen as the spiritual agonies of submission to Big Brother.
To add to his very real suffering, his co-star, Richard Burton (a famous lush) was walking around with a halo over his head modestly bragging that he’d given up the demon drink.
But had he really? Burton was magnificent in the mornings but, after lunch, he got looser and looser. His concentration would falter and, sometimes, he’d even slur his words. Was he secretly getting loaded?
Some of us noticed a faint scent of something on his breath. Was it vodka? Maybe it was aftershave? If it was vodka, where was he getting it?
His trailer was searched – no booze there. Was one of the crew slipping it to him? It appeared not. Everyone was mystified. The only thing he drank was diet coke. Every morning he brought in a 12-pack, which he worked through steadily during the day.
Towards the end of filming, one of the camera crew swiped one of Burton’s diet cokes, opened it and took a swig. It was laced with vodka! But how did he get vodka into an unopened can? A close study revealed an almost imperceptible hole in the top – a tiny hole that could only have been made by a hypodermic syringe! Who knows if Hurt was also party to this elaborate scheme?
But Hurt’s performance made the movie compelling. There’s a scene near the end where Winston Smith – who’s being tortured – has a front tooth pulled out. As luck would have it, John had a false front tooth. The story was that he’d lost it in a drunken brawl with Oliver Reed, another actor with a weakness for the hard stuff.
So this fake tooth, which had been artfully installed by a Hollywood dentist employing a lattice of fine bridgework, was removed for the scene. Reality – that’s what he went for in everything he did.
Remember when the baby monster burst out of his chest in Alien? John made it so real that not for a moment did it seem implausible.
I worked with him again on White Mischief – also directed by Mike Radford. John, very kindly, did Radford a big favour by agreeing to play a supporting role in the film.
The scheduling was difficult because John was shooting a movie in Italy at the time, but he managed to negotiate a window and flew out to Kenya to play a rich, eccentric landowner in love with the leading lady. He was brilliant. He shot his scenes in three days and hot-footed it back to the airport.
The wardrobe mistress on White Mischief told me something about him that gives an insight into his character. I’ll relate it without the names.
John Hurt had a close friend – an actor – who got married and had a child. Not long after the child was born, his friend died in a tragic car accident. For the next 18 years, John financially supported the wife and child, keeping it a secret so as not to embarrass them.
John Hurt was an incredible actor and a truly beautiful man – inside and out.
