John Hurt, a British actor who gave compelling depth to desperate, flawed and sometimes monstrously deformed characters in performances that captivated audiences and critics for more than five decades, has died. He was 77.
The actor announced in 2015 that he had pancreatic cancer. His agent, Charles McDonald, confirmed the death to The Washington Post. No further details were immediately known. Mr. Hurt had recently appeared as a Catholic priest in the film \u201cJackie\u201d opposite Natalie Portman.
The son of an Anglican vicar, Mr. Hurt discovered as a youth that he \u201cdidn\u2019t go for God.\u201d But like his father, he once observed, he spent his life revealing to others certain truths about human nature.
His tools included an almost singularly expressive face, one that with age came to be defined by a rutted forehead and baggy, hooded eyes. His voice was a gravelly rasp, colored by excessive drink and smoke.
Mr. Hurt was widely admired for his range, intensity and empathy in portraying the most complicated and outcast lives. David Lynch, who directed the actor in his title role in \u201cThe Elephant Man\u201d (1980), once called Mr. Hurt \u201csimply the greatest actor in the world.\u201d
After a promising start on stage, he found his first notable screen role in the Oscar-winning \u201cA Man for All Seasons\u201d (1966), which starred Paul Scofield as the martyred Englishman Thomas More.
The director, Fred Zinnemann, said he took a gamble casting the largely unknown Mr. Hurt as Richard Rich, a young lawyer and More disciple who betrays his mentor. \u201cI knew he was our man when I saw what explosive nervous energy he was capable of,\u201d Mr. Zinnemann wrote in a memoir.
That skittish tension remained Mr. Hurt\u2019s calling card in his roughly 200 films and TV appearances that followed. He embraced mainstream hits, including the \u201cHarry Potter\u201d series \u2014 he played the wand maker Ollivander \u2014 as well as more disquieting fare, such as Samuel Beckett\u2019s \u201cKrapp\u2019s Last Tape\u201d in which he gave, on stage and television, a tour de force depiction of a regretful writer.
Career highlights include the taut film \u201c10 Rillington Place\u201d (1971), as a man of low mental faculties wrongly executed for murders committed by the British serial killer John Christie, and \u201cThe Naked Civil Servant\u201d (1975), a British TV movie about the gay author and raconteur Quentin Crisp.
\u201cIt was a very risky piece for an actor \u2014 a television play about an effeminate homosexual who is also an exhibitionist,\u201d he told the Sunday Times of London in 2000. \u201cMany people told me it would be the end of my career.\u201d
In another celebrated British miniseries, \u201cI, Claudius\u201d (1976), Mr. Hurt gave a terrifying portrayal of the Roman emperor Caligula, a mad degenerate who fancies himself a god. Two years later, Mr. Hurt received his first Oscar nomination, for his supporting role in \u201cMidnight Express\u201d as an English junkie abused by guards in a Turkish jail.
In the New Yorker, film critic Pauline Kael extolled Mr. Hurt\u2019s power and control in roles that could have gone off the rails in dramatic excess. In \u201cMidnight Express,\u201d she wrote, he demonstrated \u201csuch inner force that he can play the most passive of roles, as he does here (he barely moves a muscle), and still transfix the audience. . .. He\u2019s an almost burned-out light bulb with just a few dim flashes of the filament left. Yet he\u2019s the most moving character in the film.\u201d
Although he lost the supporting Oscar bid to Christopher Walken in \u201cThe Deer Hunter,\u201d Mr. Hurt had appeared on Hollywood\u2019s radar and was cast in Ridley Scott\u2019s sci-fi thriller \u201cAlien\u201d (1979), a box office grand slam.
The movie provided Mr. Hurt with a graphically memorable role, as a space voyager whose stomach explodes after an extraterrestrial burrows into him. (He would lampoon that scene in Mel Brooks\u2019s 1987 film \u201cSpaceballs,\u201d with his character lamenting, \u201cOh, no, not again!\u201d)
One of his most touching performances came in \u201cThe Elephant Man,\u201d which Lynch directed and Brooks helped produce. Mr. Hurt played a Victorian-era Englishman whose grotesque disfigurement led to his years of exploitation as a carnival freak.
Mr. Hurt underwent six hours of makeup application each day to play Joseph Merrick \u2014 called John in the film \u2014 a man of dignity, tenderness and refinement underneath his deformity.
In one of the film\u2019s most notable sequences, Merrick is cornered by a mob into a train station urinal and collapses while shouting, \u201cI am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man!\u201d
Mr. Hurt\u2019s performance garnered an Oscar nomination for a leading role, but he lost to Robert De Niro as boxer Jake LaMotta in \u201cRaging Bull.\u201d
Mr. Hurt also played such haunted characters from literature as Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoyevsky\u2019s \u201cCrime and Punishment\u201d (1979), and he was superb as Winston Smith, a rebellious employee of the Ministry of Truth, in \u201cNineteen Eighty-Four\u201d (1984), based on the George Orwell book about a totalitarian future.
He was Jesus at the Last Supper, confused by an intrusive waiter, in Brooks\u2019s \u201cHistory of the World: Part I\u201d (1981); the libidinous society osteopath Stephen Ward in \u201cScandal\u201d (1989), about the Profumo-Keeler sex scandal that shook 1960s England; an erudite English writer smitten with a teenage heartthrob (Jason Priestley) in \u201cLove and Death on Long Island\u201d (1997); and an omniscient, enigmatic billionaire who funds an astronomer (Jodie Foster) in \u201cContact\u201d (1997).
Because of his skill imbuing the most eccentric parts with humanity, Mr. Hurt was one of the few actors to emerge critically unscathed from Gus Van Sant\u2019s 1993 film, \u201cEven Cowgirls Get the Blues,\u201d in which he played the Countess, described by one British reporter as \u201ca misogynist homosexual feminine-deodorant magnate.\u201d
John Vincent Hurt was born in Chesterfield, England, on Jan. 22, 1940, and grew up in Cleethorpes.
He described his parents as distant and severe, prohibiting him from mixing with neighborhood children they deemed \u201ccommon.\u201d He felt further isolated at a series of preparatory schools, one where he later said he was sexually abused by an administrator. An older brother rebelled against his parents by converting to Catholicism and later became a Benedictine monk.
From a young age, Mr. Hurt found refuge in the theater. At prep school, he was frequently cast in female roles. \u201cI had a very high voice and was quite small \u2014 and was rather pretty in those days,\u201d he later told the Scotsman newspaper. \u201cI just knew, then, that I wanted to act.\u201d
He attended art school to honor his parents\u2019 request that he train for a fallback career before winning a scholarship to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
Early on, despite his wispy physical appearance, he was singled out by theater critics for his magnetism. His portrayal of a rebellious art student in David Halliwell\u2019s dark comedy \u201cLittle Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs\u201d \u2014 which he reprised onscreen in 1974 \u2014 brought him to Zinnemann\u2019s attention.
Mr. Hurt returned periodically to the stage, with the Royal Shakespeare Company and elsewhere, but he focused chiefly on a screen career that encompassed adaptations of \u201cKing Lear,\u201d horror films, fantasies and westerns.
In such a prolific career, he was not without his misfires, including a version of \u201cRomeo and Juliet\u201d featuring an otherwise all-feline cast. He also played the British spy chief known as \u201cControl\u201d in \u201cTinker Tailor Soldier Spy\u201d (2011), a critically lauded version of the John le Carr\u00e9 novel about deceit.
His personal life was turbulent. He said he suffered from \u201cconsiderable mood swings\u201d and took pleasure in drinking with legendarily rowdy and bibulous actors such as Peter O\u2019Toole, Richard Harris and Oliver Reed.
An early marriage, to actress Annette Robertson, ended in divorce. His companion of 16 years, French fashion model Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot, was killed in a horse-riding accident in 1983.
His subsequent marriages to Donna Peacock and Jo Dalton, the mother of his two sons , ended in divorce. In 2005, he wed Anwen Rees-Myers. A complete list of survivors could not immediately be confirmed.
Mr. Hurt was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2014 for his contributions to drama.
\u201cThere isn\u2019t such a thing as a regular guy,\u201d Mr. Hurt once told the New York Times. The roles that intrigued him, he said, \u201cdemand vulnerability. . the ability to expose things that would not normally be seen.\u201d<\/p>\n

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