John Hurt

Sir John Hurt was an English actor whose career ran more than five decades and who was widely regarded as one of the finest of his generation. He was described as having the most distinctive voice in Britain, and David Lynch called him simply the greatest actor in the world. He received four BAFTAs and a Golden Globe, was nominated for two Academy Awards, and was knighted in 2015 for services to drama. He died in 2017.

His trademark was suffering played without a trace of self-pity. Max in Midnight Express (1978) is a wrecked man who has stopped performing his own tragedy. John Merrick in The Elephant Man (1980) is delivered from beneath full prosthetics, so the entire instrument is breath, diction and rhythm, and it is one of the few performances in cinema where you can hear a face. Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) is the same quality applied to political exhaustion. Even Kane in Alien (1979), a part remembered for one scene, works because Hurt spends the preceding half hour being cheerfully, unremarkably ordinary.

The later career mixed the paycheques and the serious work without apology, which is a kind of honesty. Ollivander across three Harry Potter films, Broom in the Hellboy films, Adam Sutler in V for Vendetta, Gilliam in Snowpiercer, S. R. Hadden in Contact, Control in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Christopher Marlowe in Only Lovers Left Alive. That voice also carried a parallel career in narration and animation, from Hazel in Watership Down to the Horned King in The Black Cauldron, and he was happy to send himself up in Spaceballs.