John Hurt is lost for words. The 68-year-old screen legend, former bon viveur
and craggy force of nature is here to talk about his role in the new Indiana
Jones movie, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. There’s just one
problem: he’s not allowed to talk about his role in the movie. The secrecy
machine of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas (the franchise creators) has
dictated that he can reveal nothing about the movie, other than how much he
enjoyed making it. “I don’t suppose we could talk about the lack of
enjoyment in making it?” he asks, with an irreverent schoolboy giggle.
Hurt is an inveterate talker and raconteur. So the tension between his
garrulous instincts and his willingness to honour the embargo is obvious.
“Harrison Ford does all his own fights,” he begins. “And I should know, I
was in one of them.” He stops himself, suddenly realising that a plot
revelation is spiralling out before him.
He plays Professor Oxley, a colleague of Indiana Jones, and one who is
involved, apparently, in a search for the magically endowed Mesoamerican
crystal skull of the title. Hurt’s slip implies that he is actually a
villain, perhaps even the villain. “Or then again, was I involved in
a fight with him?” he says, eyebrows raised. “It’s possible that I just
watched.”
Speaking about Ford, Hurt describes how the self-deprecating megastar, after
an impressive piece of stunt driving, had turned to him and sighed: “Well,
you don’t think they employ me to act, did you John?”
And, despite the hysteria surrounding the movie (18 years in the making), Hurt
says he refused to sign up to appear without first reading a script. “It
turned out to be rather an expensive read,” he says. “It had to be
hand-delivered from Hollywood. A courier dropped it off at three and picked
it up at eight. He was probably outside with an eye on the front door during
that time.” He gives a disdainful shrug. “It’s cops and robbers stuff. And
it’s all to make Mr Lucas an extra billion, as if he needs it.”
Hurt’s casual cynicism is a refreshing counterpoise to a movie world that’s
increasingly obsessed with brand identities and corporate edicts. Yet it’s
also typical of a debonair iconoclast who’s lived a dozen wild lives in
places as disparate as Kenya and Co Wicklow, who has married four times and
survived the booze-sodden excess of London café society to maintain a screen
career that has lasted for more than 40 years. Here his very survival is his
legacy; his tenacity and endurance his crown.
And yet you also sense the frustration. He burst on to the screen in 1975,
with a Bafta-winning role as Quentin Crisp, the self-described “stately homo
of England” in the ground-breaking TV movie, The Naked Civil Servant.
The role, a delicate portrait of steely dignity in the face of brutal mob
rule, was a revelation. “That was my break,” he says. “Some said it would
ruin my career, but it made everything possible.”
Crisp himself would refer to the actor as “my representative here on Earth”,
while Hurt says that his relationship with Crisp (who died in 1999) is
sweetly circular, as he is now preparing to shoot An Englishman in New
York, the long-awaited Civil Servant follow-up, which deals with
Crisp’s later life in Manhattan. “I shall play him with slightly more
cynicism,” he says, voice rising to a reedy half-whisper. “More thoughtful
this time.”
Hurt adds that he has always been comfortable with his own sexuality, and with
playing gay characters, from Ryan O’Neal’s lover in Partners (1982)
to the elderly lovelorn academic in Love and Death on Long Island
(1997). “It’s a big deal for some actors, and for some people,” he says.
“But I understand it. I was away at school, you know?”
He pauses after he says this. In the pause there live the well-docu-mented
stories of pressure-cooker sexuality and headmasterly abuse at Hurt’s prep
school in Kent. “So, of course, I understand it.” Another silence. For six
seconds this time, while his sad sloping eyes stare out of the window. “I
understand it.”
Hurt escaped from school with a painting scholarship to Central St Martins in
London. The son of a disciplinarian vicar, he had grown up in Derbyshire.
His acting career was kick-started, typically, by an attractive Australian
girl whom he met at a London party in 1960, and who, impressed by his gags
and impressions, convinced him to audition for RADA. Hurt was accepted, and
the roles followed – most notably as Richard Rich in A Man For All
Seasons (1966) – as did the parties.
He went superstratospheric in 1979, with a triumvirate of attention-grabbing
roles – as a heroin addict in Midnight Express, a
gore-spattered astronaut in Alien and a freak-show romantic in The
Elephant Man – that convinced the movie world that a virtuoso performer
was in its midst. Rave reviews and commercial success were accompanied by
industry-wide adulation. The producer David Puttnam waxed lyrical about
Hurt’s extraordinary eyes, and his ability to convey sadness. The director
David Lynch went farther, announcing that “John Hurt is the greatest actor
in the world”.
Hurt, however, never truly capitalised on his banner year. In fact his 1980s
more often included turkeys such as Jake Speed and Spaceballs
than gems such as 1984. He says the reason is to do with the
industry. “When you’re new and you do Midnight Express,
Elephant Man and Alien virtually together, nothing else is going
to touch it,” he says. “And because they’re such different roles producers,
who have never been my friends, don’t know how to cast you. They say, ‘But
this new part is not like Midnight Express.’ And you say, ‘But Elephant
Man was not like Midnight Express!’ ”
And still, despite a later return to form in movies as diverse as Scandal
(1989), Dead Man (1995) and Love and Death on Long Island,
there’s that sense, perhaps never far from the surface, that he was the next
Brando, the next Olivier, the next Day-Lewis in waiting. No?
“Oh God, yes, there are moments where you say, ‘Wouldn’t it have been nice?’
Look at Daniel Day-Lewis, he’s handled himself very well. He keeps retiring.
I wish I’d thought of that!” He corrects his cattier instincts. “No, I know
Danny well, and he’s very amusing. But he certainly has a very cute
understanding of the game. And he’s got them eating out of his hand.”
Did personal reasons underlie Hurt’s slump? (In 1983 his soul-mate of 16
years, the French model Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot, fell from her horse
while out riding with Hurt, and died.) “It was a horrendous time,” he says,
staring downwards. “Like all the earth in front of you was just dug up and
heaving. It had a profound effect on my life. It’s very difficult to say,
‘Well, this was post-Marie-Lise, and this pre-Marie-Lise.’ I don’t think
it’s that black and white.”
The roles continued to flow, as did the booze. “I wasn’t like Oliver Reed,” he
says, correcting a common misconception. “He was a competitive drinker. He’d
say, ‘I can drink you under the f***ing table.’ And I’d say: ‘I’m sure you
could, Oliver. But where’s the fun in that?’ ”
And all the while there was the real Hurt underneath, the razor-sharp
virtuoso, channelling his pain on to the screen. He’d pop up, say, as the
vagabond in All the Little Animals (1998), or as the righteous vicar
in Shooting Dogs (2005), just to flex his thesp muscles effortlessly
and show us what real acting is all about. Then it was back to the
vicissitudes of what Puttnam called Hurt’s “extraordinary life”.
These days, of course, he is a reformed character. He’s been dry for four
years, he says (remarkably, he gave up alcohol not because of health threats
but because he simply lost interest in it).
Hurt has had three wives since Marie-Lise. He lived with one, Donna Peacock,
on an estate in Kenya, and with another, Jo Dalton, in a Georgian farmhouse
in Ireland. “I have done all sorts of extraordinary things, I know,” he
says. “At the time I didn’t think anything of it. But when you look back you
think, ‘Jesus Christ!’ ” Yes, but would he live it again? “No thank you. I’m
with Beckett there. It’s not good enough to die. One has to be forgotten.”
Hurt, less tormented and more productive, lives now in Central London with his
fourth wife, the commercials director Anwen Rees-Meyers, who is 25 years his
junior.
He boasts a startling nine forthcoming movies, including the blockbuster Hellboy
2 and the Britflick 44 Inch Chest (opposite Ray Winstone) and, of
course, Indiana Jones.
Speaking of which, I suggest a game. I’ll run plot points (gleaned from the
internet and beyond) by him, and will judge their validity, or not, by his
reactions. There’s more than one Crystal Skull? “Hmmm, interesting,” he
says. Your character comes back from the dead? “He’d be called Lazarus,
wouldn’t he?! There’s a cameo from the Elephant Man? “Depends on how you
look at it.” And, finally, with Crisp in mind, you have a homosexual
relationship with Indiana Jones. “I wish!” he says, before sneering: “Oh
yes, Lucas would really dare to put something like that in!”
Interview over. The publicist enters. “I told him everything,” he says,
grinning. “I let the whole thing out of the bag.” Then he stands up and
leaves, still chortling, still slyly and irrepressibly Hurt.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is released on May 22
2008
