John HURT

A revelatory first biography of the actor John Hurt by the award-winning biographer Ian Collins, based on interviews with the Hurt’s family, friends and co-stars.

John Hurt (1940-2017) was ‘simply the greatest actor in the world’ to director David Lynch and legions of fans. Creating a breath-taking range of iconic roles over six decades, he flailed only when playing himself.

The Hurt gallery included the derided and disturbed: the Elephant Man; an exhibitionist homosexual in an age of persecution; a child-like psychopath with absolute power; history’s ultimate victim, wrongfully hanged for the murder of his wife and child.

Then came traitors and spy chiefs, tormented lovers and torturers, a jailed junkie, an astronaut who gestated an exploding alien in his chest cavity, the sad, mad and misunderstood, the martyred and dangerous to know. ‘Everyone I have ever played has been flawed,’ he said.

Thin skin – an immense understanding of how human beings hurt and are hurting – defined a hugely humanitarian talent and a troubled life. For all the daredevil fun of a self-styled ‘rogue and vagabond,’ childhood abuse and adult addiction lay behind transcendent acting.

Award-winning biographer Ian Collins, who knew John Hurt in his final years, pays powerful and poignant tribute in the forthcoming book John Hurt: Life Drama – a revelatory portrait that draws on compelling interviews with the actor’s family, friends and colleagues, as well as private letters and diaries, and previously unseen photographs.

Ultimately, the life drama makes the art even more triumphant.

Ian Collins is an independent art writer and curator. He has written numerous biographies and monographs, including ground-breaking studies of John Craxton, James Dodds, Rose Hilton, Joan Leigh Fermor, John McLean and Guy Taplin. His three-volume history of East Anglian art, and many features for the Eastern Daily Press, led to the 2013 Masterpieces: Art and East Anglia exhibition and a record audience for the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich. He has also worked with the Aldeburgh Festival, British Museum, Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Benaki Museum in Athens and A.G. Leventis Gallery in Nicosia. He lives in England and Greece.