RIP John Hurt

[47of74]

RIP John Hurt

rollingstone.com/movies/news/john-hurt-oscar-nominated-elephant-man-actor-dead-at-77-w463518

Quote

John Hurt, the Oscar-nominated British actor who starred in films like The Elephant Man, Midnight Express, Alien and the Harry Potter series over a career that spanned more than 50 years, died Friday at the age of 77. Hurt's agent confirmed the actor's death to the BBC.

No cause of death was immediately known, but Hurt revealed in 2015 that he was battling pancreatic cancer. "I can’t say I worry about mortality, but it’s impossible to get to my age and not have a little contemplation of it,” Hurt told the Radio Times after the diagnosis. “We're all just passing time, and occupy our chair very briefly."

Hurt first came to prominence after appearing in the Best Picture Oscar-winning A Man of All Seasons in 1966. Hurt, who decided against a career as an art teacher to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, would appear in countless TV and film roles, including roles in Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, Stephen Frears' The Hit, Sam Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend and the 1984 adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Hurt played the novel's protagonist Winston Smith.

Hurt was also perhaps cinema's greatest sufferer: In a video that the actor himself posted on YouTube, Hurt highlighted the approximately 40 times he died onscreen. That tally included four fatal stabbings, four suicides, 11 times shot to death and, thanks to Alien and Spaceballs, two chest-burstings.

 

[ADoyle90815]

RIP John Hurt. He was such a great actor, and probably one of my favorite roles he did was of Caligula in I, Claudius. I also loved him in Spaceballs "Oh no, not again!"