R.I.P. John Hurt

The gravelly voice revealed the depth and width of his life experience. The gravelly voice had a surprising mellifluous quality surging through the roughness. The voice could sing, it could shout. It could break your heart. He did not come out of life unscathed. None of us do. Experience had marked him, as it marks us all. His experience of life – all of it, the good, the bad, the ugly, the decadent beauty, the doomed hope, the sense of humor – was in his face (from the get-go) and in his voice.

The good acting teachers teach their students that who they ARE is what they bring to the table. That’s all you have to work with. It may sound cliched – as well as a nursery-school-level attitude – but it is extremely important: There is only one You. Your best bet in the competitive world of the business called Show is to cultivate and accept (hell, even KNOW) yourSELF. Your SELF will be rejected more times than it is accepted, especially in the beginning, before you’ve had success. But if you try to be someone else, if you think that THAT is your best bet, you may have SOME success but it will be of a superficial quality. It won’t last. Your career will have no resonance. What you bring to the table, as you, is your most valuable asset. Even in transformations, your inner essence is what you work from. Some actors get this. Others don’t. The ones who get it are the ones who are able to so completely transform that there is something damn near otherworldly about it.

This is what John Hurt was capable of. It is what interested him as an actor. I am only one man, I am myself, but I have so much curiosity about other people that I want to live MANY lives and to do that to the best of my ability. What is it like to be this guy? What does he think about? What do his shoes feel like on his feet? What are his dreams? What dreams have died? What’s it like in somebody else’s head? Hurt’s transformations were not of the grandstanding kind. They were part of the eccentricity – and humility – of his gift. It is why his career lasted so long.

What goes on in an actor’s imagination is as real as “real life”. That’s the gig. That’s the essential task. That’s the thing that civilians have a hard time grasping. Hamlet watches an actor well up with tears during a make-believe moment in a rehearsal and ponders:

Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wanned,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing—
For Hecuba!
What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba
That he should weep for her?

Hamlet’s words are the most accurate description in existence of the wondrous mystery of the best kind of acting. Acting really is a “dream of passion.” An actor asks himself: “What’s ______ to me or me to ______ that I should weep for her?” It’s really the only question. (In acting, anyway. Hamlet’s OTHER question applies to all of us.)

Over his lengthy and versatile career, John Hurt entered into many worlds, many people, with an audacity and confidence that was always thrilling to watch. It was not grandstanding his gift. It was more a beautiful representation of that magical identification thing that happens only with the Greats. His skill in this type of identification was dazzling, but it was more than skill.

Humphrey Bogart said that good acting went six feet deep back in the eyes.

John Hurt went that deep. Always.

Rest in peace.

May 1998. Actor John Hurt. ©Graham Barclay.