Everyone seems to have a John Hurt story. A friend of mine who works in the film industry once had to assist him as he made his way unsteadily from a hotel bar to a waiting taxi. A husband and wife I know bumped into him at what might be described as a ‘bohemian’ party in London. Another friend, an artist, invited a few people back to his flat after a night out, only to find that one of them was John Hurt. My friend left the room briefly and, upon his return, found the actor had taken off his clothes. He wanted to be painted in the nude.
But those days are behind him now, apparently; that behaviour a distant memory. Certainly the man I meet in a hotel a short walk from the place he shares with his fourth wife, on the Tottenham Court Road, seems calm and dignified; a little wistful if anything. ‘Walked here,’ he says in his hypnotically low and croaky voice, clipping his sentences. ‘Love walking around London. Rarely get recognised.’
And this despite his melancholic, downturned eyes being pretty recognisable. Small and narrow they are, like raisins set in a craggy rock face. Today he is wearing glasses, which disguise them a bit; and the grey goatee, with what looks like a nicotine stain on its moustache, is a newish addition. At 68 his 5ft 9in frame is wiry and he looks healthy; healthier than he used to. ‘Not short of energy. Reasonably fit. Don’t do anything other than walk. Walk a lot.’
And the drinking? ‘Oh, my drinking days are over.’
When did he last have one? ‘Three, three and half, four years ago, perhaps.’
That was when he got married, near enough. Does he miss it? ‘Not at all, not at all.’ Because it has bad associations? ‘It has good associations for the most part. It’s just times change. You change. When it no longer seemed to help, creatively, I mean, as it unquestionably had helped at one stage, it seemed time to give it up. Besides, attitudes to drinking have changed. Would Churchill have been able to get away with his drinking if he had been a politician today? Yet it really helped him. He was able to make good decisions while drinking. Huge decisions. The crowd I used to drink with, people like [Peter] O’Toole, used it as a fuel for their creativity. We used to go to Muriel’s, near St Martins. Like-minded people congregated there. Francis [Bacon]. Lucian [Freud]. It was a café society really. Muriel would say, “Hello c—y.” A term of affection.’
It’s true, it’s true. The café society part. Hurt belonged to a circle of wild-living and hard-drinking but also highly creative artists and actors. As well as O’Toole there was Richard Harris and Oliver Reed. But Hurt seemed to keep it up, or at least stay alive, for longer than most. He wasn’t particularly pleasant when he was drinking, mind. ‘There were times when he was a boring drunk and prickly, contentious,’ his friend Don Boyd has said. And just before he stopped drinking he was ejected from Spearmint Rhino for ‘boorish behaviour’, which, considering that’s a lap-dancing club, must have been very boorish indeed. He now says he could not have carried on drinking as he did because it would have killed him.
Has the not-drinking left a vacuum in his life? ‘Not really, no. No, I didn’t find any… any difficulty.’
Did he like himself when he was drinking? Long pause. ‘Oh God. This is all going to be about drink, isn’t it?’
He’d rather not talk about that aspect of his past? ‘Not really. I get a bit tired of it. Because it takes up so much space and it’s not important enough for that. My life has changed as my circumstances have changed. So to talk about my drinking now is of no interest to me.’
Which is fair enough. And besides, my favourite John Hurt story is not one of drunken excess but of mistaken identity. The DJ Andy Kershaw told me it. As a young man in 1985, Kershaw was asked to present Live Aid simply because, he said, the organisers knew a live broadcast on that scale would be one cock-up after another, but that with Kershaw’s air of amateurishness and naivety they might just get away with it. At one juncture his producer said into his earpiece that he had to go into the next room to interview John Hurt. ‘John who?’ Kershaw whispered. ‘You know,’ the producer whispered back, ‘The Elephant Man.’ Kershaw duly began his interview: ‘So, tell me about your work with elephants.’ Hurt, being a kind man as well as an old pro, said: ‘Well, when I was working on the film…’ and seamlessly launched into an anecdote.
In Kershaw’s defence, John Hurt didn’t exactly look like John Hurt in that film – just as he didn’t look like John Hurt when he played Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant, or the heroin addict in Midnight Express, or the unwitting host for the alien in Alien, or the petulant Caligula in I, Claudius. He is, in other words, a great actor. An actor, moreover, who is always in demand, specialising in eccentrics with sinister charm, in victims, in misfits and lunatics. In the next few months we will see him in the new Indiana Jones movie (he was the only actor who refused to sign up to it without seeing a script) as well as the new Hellboy and, oh, various others, three or four, as he might vaguely say. Cameos mostly.
And that’s the trouble. He is also a promiscuous actor, having been in more than 100 films. This means that for every soaring eagle there is a flightless turkey; for every Alien, a Spaceballs. He says so himself: ‘I’ve done some stinkers in the cinema. You can’t regret it; there are always reasons for doing something, even if it’s just the location.’
Perhaps that will be his excuse for The Oxford Murders, which opens this month. Oxford is a lovely location, after all. The film is about two men – a professor of logic (Hurt) and a student (Elijah Wood, he of Lord of the Rings fame) – who meet for the first time at the moment a body is discovered. A series of murders follows, none of which is, technically, a murder. ‘It’s a murder story without a murder,’ Hurt says. ‘They are intellectual murders that happen in front of your eyes.’ The film amounts to a somewhat clunky bluffer’s guide to Wittgenstein: specifically, the philosopher’s idea that truth lies only in mathematical equations. The mathematics side appealed to Hurt. His father was a mathematician. Got a double first. Became an Anglican vicar.
‘I drove him mad when he was trying to teach me maths,’ Hurt recalls, dragging his fingers through hair so thick it is a global affront to balding men. ‘He was the sort of person who would do an equation for fun. But I couldn’t summon the energy for things I wasn’t interested in. The mind just wandered. Anyway, parents are the worst teachers, if they are good at it and you’re not. My father thought I was the densest offspring he could have produced.’
Hurt’s older brother Michael went to Cambridge. We shall come to him. Hurt, meanwhile, went to an art college in Grimsby and, after that, to St Martin’s College of Art and Design in London, where one of the models he painted was Quentin Crisp. He dropped out after a couple of years to go to Rada. That was in 1960. He burnt all his canvases. ‘It was one of those Faustian deals you make with yourself at that age. Shouldn’t have done, really. Didn’t even take photographs of it. But it doesn’t matter. A man is his memory. I’m with Buñuel on that.’
John Hurt seems to have lived an unsettled life, and that was part of the problem in terms of keeping paintings. As well as being on location much of the time, he has lived in Ireland, Kenya (where his ex-wife still lives, with most of his possessions, including his awards) and he has a second home in Ibiza. He has said that it is a good job he travels light: ‘I have to. I’ve given it all away three times. Three ex-wives. I tend not to keep things now. Not a collector of memorabilia.’
Still, he has recently taken up painting again. It seems to have helped fill the bottle-shaped hole in his life. He doesn’t show them though. ‘Quite private. Haven’t got enough, quite honestly. Enough finished, I mean. For an exhibition. I suppose I could exhibit anonymously like Bruce Bernard?… In the end the reason I gave up painting was that I wasn’t sure what I wanted to paint. I hugely admired Munch, but Munch knew exactly what he wanted to paint.’
Was it pride? Fear of being criticised? ‘Fear of not being good enough.’ Did that fear ever filter into his acting career? ‘Difficult areas these. Need a psychiatrist to work them out. Don’t know quite. How my film career happened, I don’t know. It was unplanned. I’d been in films and TV throughout the Sixties and early Seventies but it was really The Naked Civil Servant in 1975 that put me on the radar. It was so autre, as Quentin would say. Everyone told me not to do it. It will wreck your career. You’re going too far. You will be typecast as a homosexual after this. At the time it was considered so outrageous. The mailbag I got after making that?… The people?…’
Homophobic insults? ‘No. Gratitude. It changed people’s lives. It was fascinating for me to find out how all these men had been living with this secrecy.’
At the moment he is planning a sequel. In negotiation. Can’t really talk about it. ‘It will be a bookend but with a different aspect. The whole period in New York. Instead of dealing with the abuse, Quentin is dealing with sycophancy and fame. On a personal level I do have admiration for him. He is a remarkable man. He had his weaknesses like anyone, but he chose a route that was as difficult as it is possible to chose. He was both oblique and objective about my performance. He said,’ – he adopts a camp and wispy voice – ‘Mr Hurt is my representative here on earth.’
He is intrigued by the extent to which attitudes have changed. ‘Society is constantly recalibrating, redefining what it considers to be moral and immoral. Look at homophobia. Attitudes have changed 180 degrees. Family life has totally changed as a concept. Divorce is a commonplace. You almost wonder when you get married how long it will be before the divorce.’ Well, he might. ‘Oh no, not me. Not any more. I’m wonderfully married. Enjoying it.’ He flicks imaginary dust from his trouser leg.
His wife is Anwen Rees-Meyers, some 25 years his junior. She is a former actress and classical pianist who now directs advertisements. They have no plans to have children, not least because he already has two grown-up sons from a previous marriage. I ask what is he like to live with. Does he help with the housework? The cooking? ‘I’ve always done that. Think I’m probably easier to live with now than I was before. I don’t know. Maybe I’m in denial.’
What did his father make of his divorces? ‘He wouldn’t marry anyone who had had a divorce. I shared his religious views until I was about 16, then I started questioning. I thought, how can this part be right if that is wrong? Where does religion come from? It seemed clear to me that religion came from man’s impatience, his absolute need to answer the mysteries immediately. Can’t sit back and say, “I don’t understand that.” Instead you have to have voices coming through from the heavens and the word becoming God and so on. With Muslims it is Allah speaking through the Prophet.
“That’s why religion causes so much war. Religious people know deep down that that is the most vulnerable area of their lives and when others question it they are liable to hit out and feel insulted. You know it is absolutely without proof yet people still commit themselves totally to this belief. They cannot refute it because it is so central to their lives.’
For the first time in the interview, Hurt has dropped his calm demeanour and become animated. He clasps his hands. He sits forward. This, clearly, is a subject that vexes him, it being an uncomfortable reminder of his distant relationship with his father.
Yet if religion cast a long shadow over his life, it cast a much longer one over his brother’s. ‘He converted to Catholicism to become a monk at Downside. Then he jumped over the wall and married a nun and that was a disaster that ended in annulment. Then he met a 19-year-old girl, had three children, the youngest of whom is now 26, then that marriage was annulled too and he went back to the Benedictine monkhood. Fascinating character.’
I’ll say. Especially in terms of his utter rejection of his father’s Protestantism. ‘Well quite.’ And if his brother has had doubts about a life of celibacy once?… ‘Yes, I’ve had conversations with him about this. I know there are doubts there, but somehow he keeps them out. This was when we were younger – I liked to stir things up a bit.’
One of Hurt’s best performances in recent years was as the philandering politician Alan Clark. Like Clark, he has been targeted by the press over drink and marital split-ups, once, memorably, with the headline, ‘Elephant Man packs trunk’. Clark supposedly had a deathbed conversion to Catholicism. Has Hurt considered the possibility that he might have one, too? ‘Quick blessing at the end, you mean? If it did happen I would know it was my weakness rather than a strength. I hope I shall have the courage to say, “Vroom! Here we go! Let’s become different molecules!” I saw the doubt in my father’s eyes. He was 95. I was with him almost when he died.’
That was in 1999. He thinks his father probably suffered from acute mood swings, which were glossed over within the family. He also thinks he may have inherited them. ‘Ups and downs’, he calls them. One of the worst downs came in 1983, on the day he saw Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot, his girlfriend of 16 years, killed in a riding accident in Oxfordshire. His horse bolted. She went after it but lost her stirrup and was thrown, landing on her head on the road.
His mood swings were worse in those days. ‘Drink doesn’t make you feel better,’ he has said of that period in his life. ‘It just exacerbates the mood you are in.’ His wild behaviour may have looked like fun on the outside, he added, but actually it was a sign of a distressed person looking for something he couldn’t find. Eventually he did find it, it seems: in the world of acting, of pretending to be someone else. ‘Reality is dull. I’m complete when I’m working. It isn’t work.’
Some actors, of course, become actors because they never felt loved for themselves as children. With this in mind, I ask if his urge to perform grew out of watching his father give sermons every Sunday. ‘I suppose he did hold a congregation the way an actor holds an audience. A similar contract was entered into.’
Though he has spent much of his adult life in front of a camera, he can still feel a self-consciousness about it. ‘It varies. Ebbs and flows, like confidence. That spark is not always there. You have to find a way round that if inspiration is not with you. Acting is an imaginative exercise. It would be odd if you didn’t try to identify with the roles you play, but I think I can differentiate between where my imagination is leading me and where I actually am. I see myself as an interpretative actor rather than a creative one. And I quite like to be directed. There are great talents out there. Spielberg, of course. But Indiana Jones is a tried and tested franchise. Lot of build-up. Let’s hope the public like it. It will be a guarantee for the first weekend. Whether it has legs will remain to be seen. But there is also the likes of Guillermo del Toro. A great talent. As you will see with Hellboy II.’
Does he intimidate younger directors? ‘I hope not. I try not to intimidate. I find it hard to imagine that anyone could be intimidated by me. I wasn’t like Larry. When I played the Fool to his Lear, the scene on the heath, I said, “Watch out here, it’s slippy,’ and he hissed: “Is it.” And I said, “All right, slip over then and break your flipping neck, dear.” ‘
It is an endearing anecdote; perhaps it’s the one he told Andy Kershaw at Live Aid all those years ago. It reminds you of his longevity and his range. It also reminds you that John Hurt is one of the least acquisitive actors in the industry. He probably preferred being a Fool to a Lear. Less obvious. More quirky. He doesn’t seem overtly ambitious in that way. He covets few roles, chases few scripts, declines to build up myths about himself. Just waited for things to come to him, as with his answers to the eternal questions.
Unexpectedly, for an actor, he even seems to have lacked vanity. For many years, I have read, he refused to have a mirror in the house. Perhaps it was simply that he didn’t like what he saw in it – until he stopped drinking.
‘The Oxford Murders’ opens on 25 April; ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ is scheduled for release next month; ‘Hellboy II: The Golden Army’, is scheduled for August
The Naked Civil Servant.’Half the stuff I have done which has been successful would never have been made if it had been shown to focus groups. ”Elephant Man” would never have been made. Imagine the pitch for ”Naked Civil Servant”. A self-confessed homosexual who crusades for gay rights. They’d say f— off. You have to be brave’.
The Elephant Man.’Mel Brooks [producer] had the vision, actually. When I read the script it made me cry. I was cast because David Lynch had seen me in ”I, Claudius” and ”Naked Civil Servant”. He encouraged me not to do the same thing, to try something different, so I worked on the sweet voice and demeanour. Nowadays directors want youto do what you’vedone before’.
Love and Death on Long Island.’Great title, super script. Richard Kwietniowski took seven years to get it made. I suppose that was better than the20-odd years it took to make ”Gandhi”. When Dickie Attenborough was telling me it had taken him 20 years to get it off the ground, I said: ”You did that one? I thought it was David Lean.” He had a bit of a sense of humour failure about that’.