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.