John Hurt

To director David Lynch, and to legions of fans, John Hurt (1940–2017) was ‘simply the greatest actor in the world’. His gallery included the derided and disturbed: an exhibitionist homosexual in an age of persecution; a psychopathic emperor with absolute power; a man wrongfully hanged for the murder of his wife and child; an astronaut who gestated an exploding alien in his chest cavity. Then came traitors and spy chiefs, tormented lovers and torturers, the martyred and dangerous to know. From Lincolnshire schoolboy to national treasure, the actor’s spectacular talent and troubled life fed an immense understanding of how human beings hurt and are hurting. For all the daredevil fun of a self-styled ‘rogue and vagabond’, childhood abuse and adult addiction lay behind his transcendent acting. Ultimately, the drama of his own life makes the art even more triumphant.Award-winning biographer Ian Collins, who knew John Hurt in his final years, pays powerful and poignant tribute in this revelatory portrait, which draws on compelling interviews with the actor’s family, friends, and colleagues, private letters and diaries, and previously unseen photographs. What becomes clear, across a breathtaking range of iconic roles over six decades, is that John Hurt flailed only when playing himself.