By Ray Bennett
At his elegant home in Chiswick in west London, John Hurt, who was born 85 years ago today, smoked cigarettes contentedly and over a long, relaxed conversation, spoke candidly to me about many things including the art of acting.
Michael Radford’s screen version of George Orwell’s ‘1984’, in which he stars, was about to be released and Richard Burton, who plays Inner Party member O’Brien in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, had died aged 58 that August, so naturally I asked how they got along.
‘I think Richard found that without alcohol privacy was probably an easier way to pass his time but he was still very good with people,’ Hurt said. ‘He always had his arms outwards even when he wasn’t drinking at all, which he wasn’t. In a sense, it was a bit like a wounded bull but then it wasn’t just that, there was the operation on his neck and things that aggravated him insofar as he didn’t have the power just to be who he is. We got on very well. It was almost as if we were contemporaries. It was a very good feeling.’
Hurt said that he and Burton also worked in a very similar way. ‘We switch on and off quite easily,’ he said. ‘Obviously, when you’re doing a very heavy film, you develop a rather unique sense of humour. When you’re not shooting, there are quite a lot of jokes going around, which Richard and I and Michael all enjoyed along with the rest of the cast and crew. I don’t think you’d find that with some of the heavy American stars because they tend to wear it on their sleeve and make you understand that it is damned hard work. I’ve always been of the opinion that it is the imagination that flies. That’s how you take an audience, with your imagination. That, presumably, is what talent is. It’s not endless observation, which of course is page one. Of course you observe, every artist observes whatever they are – painters, writers, musicians. To wear it on your sleeve … I don’t know, it seems to me the justifying something in a kind of way. I don’t quite know what.’
Hurt went on to ruminate about certain Hollywood stars: ‘Robert De Niro makes extraordinary announcements when asked by the press – you never quite know how well it’s reported – but quite clearly when asked about acting he has said, “I want it to be real.” At the time, he was doing “Raging Bull”. This is either a very naive or stupid remark insofar as Jake LaMotta was still walking about. It can’t be real. Jake LaMotta was the real thing and there was no question about it. What you can do is imaginatively create a reality that the audience believes. Then you get Al Pacino saying things like “My constant search is to reach that point where you do not have to act.” Acting all the way, I thought, when he said it. To me, that is page one. Of course that is the impression you wish to give so I know what he means. He means to be able to walk straight into it in a way that it has such a point of reality that you cannot distinguish. But that is the art and it is only the imagination that will get you there.’
He said he didn’t mean that therefore actors should be lazy about observation and research but those things, to him, were the technicalities of being a performer on a high level. ‘These are things you take for granted, it seems to me,’ he said. ‘When Stanislavsky basically invented The Method, it was at a time when the Moscow Arts Theatre was pretty well at a low ebb. It was resting on its ancient laurels and along came a particularly good playwright named Chekhov so something had to be done because on the first reading of “The Cherry Orchard”, they all sat around and said, well, there are no parts in it. Stanislavsky was much too serious for Chekhov anyway, as an aid to imagination. But it was an aid. Imagination in any artist must be the quality that is the envy of the human race, is it not? It must be, because otherwise I don’t think we’d be sitting here talking. It’s not my research that anyone’s interested in. The question always comes down to how do you act? And, of course, there is no answer.’
Hurt died aged 77 on January 25, 2017.
Thinking of my Dad on New Year’s Eve
By Ray Bennett
My late older brother Roland phoned from England on New Year’s Eve to tell me that our Dad, Alexander Bennett, had died. I thought it was 35 years ago but another year has slipped by and I see that it’s 36. December 31, 1988. I was living in Franklin, Tennessee, just south of Nashville, alone again, naturally. Ro said Dad had been feeling chipper but that morning he put on jacket and tie as always to walk to the shops but soon returned complaining of chest pains. He had been suffering from a touch of angina. He sat down in his favourite armchair holding his wife’s hand then said “Oh, oh,’ and passed away.
Our family home had been a flat in a converted railway station in Ashford, Kent, until Mum, Winifred, died aged 62 on the same day as Elvis Presley. Sometime after, Dad moved back to his native Devon where, aged 80, he married a sweet and kind widow named Wink and lived with her in a charming bungalow in Budleigh Salterton. We had known her for years as she was the sister of our beloved Aunt Doffy, who was married to Dad’s brother Fred. I spoke to Wink and she said she was okay and grateful that ‘I had seven years with a wonderful man.’ She had two sons from her first marriage who would take care of her.
My younger brother Richard (on the left in the photo next to Ro, Dad and me) joked on the phone that Dad had gone to give god a hard time. We laughed because Dad would have laughed at that as he had no truck with religion. He had a remarkable life’s journey. Son of a farm labourer with nine siblings, he journeyed in his teens during the First World War to faraway Kent to work on British Railways. Labouring as a plate-layer – called a gandy-dancer in the early days of railways in the United States – he went to night-school, won promotions to white-collar positions and ended up as Chief Inspector of the Permanent Way. I never heard the word ‘profit’ growing up. Dad’s only concern was keeping passengers and crew safe as they rode the rails.
Ro said Dad had accepted fate, saying, ‘I had a good innings; I don’t want anyone to be upset.’ It was typical of a hard man with a soft heart, enquiring mind and whimsical sense of humour. An avid reader and skilled gardener, he voted Labour all his life but trusted no-one. When a party member rang our door bell seeking to recruit me, Dad gave him short shrift. He despised Margaret Thatcher, who worked to destroy unions in the Eighties, saying it reminded him of the Twenties when Winston Churchill sent out armed police on horseback to put down protests during the General Strike. ‘We were beetles,’ he said, ‘ and they wore heavy boots.’
Dad taught me an important life lesson when I was 10. For a primary school assignment, I asked him to tell me how the railway worked. He gave me a broad outline and then some specific details always speaking extemporaneously. He knew the railway inside out from the bottom up.
Dad took me aboard a steam locomotive, which was exciting, and inside a railway signal box. A tall boxy structure sitting at a junction, it had steps leading up to a large room filled with rows of multi-coloured, four-feet tall levers that the signalman used to control sets of points on the tracks. We walked along the line, stepping over the wooden supports called sleepers, to see the points – tapered steel blades, movable rails. Each pair was governed by a lever in the signal box.
I thought that being on a train was simple: you boarded, enjoyed the ride and when it reached your destination, there you were. Seeing that signal box and its control of the switching points showed me it wasn’t that simple. On a train, with the switch of a lever, you could end up in London, Birmingham, Edinburgh or Paris. Later, I discovered poets who wrote about crossroads in their lives and taking paths less traveled. They made it look as if were always by choice. The signal box gave me my first clue that in life you might move a lever yourself or the points would be switched by others. When that happened, there was no knowing where you might end up. It depended upon who pulled the lever.
I don’t put too much stock in it but Dad never celebrated New Year’s Eve. Neither do I.