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John Vincent Hurt CBE (born January 22, 1940) is an Academy Award nominated English actor. He is one of Britain's best-known and most prolific and sought after character actors, and has had a very versatile career spanning over 40 years. He has played a vast array of character roles, many of whom were well documented historical figures, with great credibility.
Early life
Hurt was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire to Phyllis, an amateur actress, and Arnould Herbert Hurt, a clergyman. However, he was raised in Cleethorpes, where he studied art, but turned to the stage in 1962. He performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). He was also for many years an alcoholic, yet has since rid himself of his addiction.
Career
Hurt's first film was 1962's The Wild and the Willing, but his first major role was as Richard Rich in 1966's A Man for All Seasons. However, it was his portrayal of the outrageous Quentin Crisp in the 1975 TV play, The Naked Civil Servant, that shot him to fame, earning the British Academy Television Award for Best Actor in the process. The following year, Hurt portrayed the infamous Roman emperor Caligula in the major BBC drama serial, I, Claudius. In 1978 John appeared in Midnight Express, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He subsequently developed a successful film career, with his best known roles including Kane, the memorable first victim of the title creature in the film Alien (a role which he reprised as a parody in Spaceballs), would-be art school radical Scrawdyke in Little Malcolm and as "John" Merrick in the Joseph Merrick biography The Elephant Man, for which he won a Bafta and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor.. He also had a starring role in Sam Peckinpah's critically panned but hugely successful final film, The Osterman Weekend (1983).
Besides film and theatre, Hurt once supplied a voiceover for a cautionary TV commercial that appeared on British television in the late '70's and early '80's, which showed children meeting their demise in various swamps and building sites. A Grim Reaper-like figure would appear, unseen, behind whichever child was about to fall or drown (whilst "showing off"), and this, combined with Hurt's monosyllabic voice and the whispered words at the end of the commercial "I'll be back", earned it a place in Channel 4's programme TV's Scariest Moments. (This was Donald Pleasance not John Hurt).
Throughout his career, Hurt has also played roles in famous political allegory stories that sharply contrast themselves with him first playing the hero in an early production, and then the tyrannical villain in a later work. For instance, he has played Winston Smith in the 1984 adaptation of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and assumed the role of a Big Brother-esque leader of a fascist Great Britain in the 2006 film V for Vendetta, a movie which draws many parallels to the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In a similar parallel, Hurt played Hazel, the heroic rabbit leader of his warren in the film adaptation of Watership Down and later played the major villain, General Woundwort, in the animated television series.
In 1986, Hurt provided the voiceover for AIDS: Iceberg / Tombstone, a public information film warning of the dangers of AIDS.
He was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in June 2004.
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