MORE than 30 years after John Hurt launched his career with the lead role in the television play The Naked Civil Servant he is set to return to star in a sequel.

The original was shown on ITV in 1975 and featured Hurt as Quentin Crisp, who referred to himself as the “stately homo of England”. It was based on Crisp’s own memoirs.

The sequel, in which Hurt, who went on to star as Caligula in I, Claudius, and the movies The Elephant Man and Scandal, will be set mainly in the 1980s and 1990s in New York where Crisp had gone to live. ITV will shoot the play this autumn.

“We’re hugely excited by it,” said Nick Elliott, who commissioned the play before he stepped down as ITV’s head of drama earlier this summer and is remaining as ITV’s drama consultant.

The original play is considered ITV’s most successful and highly rated single drama.

An Englishman in New York has been written by Brian Fillis, who also wrote last year’s BBC4 drama Fear of Fanny, a biopic about the celebrity cook Fanny Cradock. “Quentin had always looked on New York as a romantic place and he decided to go there after the success of the ITV drama,” said Fillis.

Crisp’s romantic view of New York and America was coloured by wartime relationships with GIs in London and by a love of Hollywood movies.

Born in 1908 as Denis Pratt, Crisp had tried journalism and the art world, but never got much work. So he resorted to being an artist’s model and prostitute.

After the war he became well known in parts of London for his trademark bright make-up, crimson dyed hair and his painted finger and toenails.

He lived his life as a minor celebrity before writing a couple of books and then his memoirs The Naked Civil Servant, which came out in 1968. They were reprinted at the time of the ITV drama.

The new drama is based on the diaries Crisp wrote in the magazine The New York Native and on conversations with New Yorkers who remember him. “He went there because he wanted to be his own man in a new city, and because he also wanted to entertain and be entertained,” said James Burstall, who runs Leopardrama , the company making the play for ITV.

Crisp died on a visit back to his homeland in 1999 at the age of 90. He was cremated in Britain but asked for his ashes to be sprinkled over Manhattan.

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