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Here already, it was the vulnerability he lent what might otherwise be a routinely despicable character that made him so effective. But in 1966 his performance in the title role of David Halliwell’s stage play Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs (a role he would later recreate in the screen version, released in 1974) attracted the attention of Fred Zinnemann, who cast him as the treacherous Richard Rich in A Man for All Seasons (1966). Starting out with some routine television bit-parts ( Z-Cars, Armchair Theatre and the like), he made a forgettable screen debut with Ralph Thomas’s tepid student drama, The Wild and the Willing (1962). Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs (1974) Instead they pressured him to become an art teacher, and in 1959 he won a scholarship to study at St Martin’s School in London but the desire to act, first inspired by seeing Alec Guinness in Oliver Twist (1948), was too strong to be resisted, and in 1960 he won another scholarship, this time to RADA. He was developing a taste for acting – something of which, as might be expected, his parents disapproved. While there he appeared as Lady Bracknell in a school production of The Importance of Being Earnest. When his father moved to a parish in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, Hurt (then 12) was transferred to Christ’s Hospital School in Lincoln as a boarder. At age eight he was sent to a preparatory school, St Michael’s in Otford, Kent, which he later described as “one of those very rarefied, very Anglo-Catholic establishments where they rejoiced in more religious paraphernalia and theatricality than the entire Vatican”. (His older brother, Michael, later converted to Catholicism and became a monk.) Hurt had a strict upbringing: although the family lived opposite a cinema, he was never allowed to see films there – something he had in common with David Lean. He was born in Shirebrook, Derbyshire, where his High Church father was the Anglican vicar. If so, it might be traced back to his upbringing. He was rarely attracted to heroic characters, finding them less interesting – an exception was his Catholic priest in Michael Caton-Jones’ treatment of the Rwandan genocide, Shooting Dogs (2006) – yet while Hurt was in no sense religious, there was what could perhaps be seen as a spiritual dimension in virtually every role he played.
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It’s there in his Caligula, in his professional hitman Braddock in The Hit (1984), in his avaricious Marquis of Montrose in Rob Roy (1995), his philosophical bounty hunter in John Hillcoat’s Aussie western The Proposition (2005) – “Life is very sweet, brother,” he says, shot and dying – in his snarlingly misogynistic mobster Old Man Peanut in 44 Inch Chest (2009), even in his teeth-grinding Big-Brother-style dictator in V for Vendetta (2005). “Didn’t occur to you that it might be my natural hu-mil-it-y spea-king?” Hurt separates out the syllables to bring out the emperor’s paranoia here as ever, he could make the spaces between words, and even within the words themselves, infinitely expressive.įor while Hurt could play villains, the putting-upon no less than the put-upon, consummately well, he always brought to them an underlying vulnerability. “Ye-e-es – and you took me at my word, didn’t you? Ty-pi-cal!” raves Caligula. But you ordered us not to, sire, protests a quavering senator.
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Sporting curly blond locks, he returns from his ‘victory over Neptune’ (his ‘spoils’ chests full of seashells) to confront a terrified group of elderly senators and berate them for not having arranged a suitably effusive reception. Something of the same relish in outrageousness, though in a more lethal register, informed Hurt’s performance as deranged emperor Caligula in BBC TV’s I, Claudius (1976) in which, as he later admitted, he was “having a ball”.