John Hurt, the celebrated British actor who was nominated twice for Academy Awards but never won, has been remembered in the In Memoriam section of the 2017 Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles.
Hurt’s nominations were for best actor for The Elephant Man in 1981, the David Lynch-directed film about a disfigured man in Victorian London, and for best supporting actor in 1979 for his role as a prison junkie in Alan Parker’s Midnight Express.
These were two of the high points of brilliant career over several decades, which took off in the early 1970s with roles in the gruesome true-crime study 10 Rillington Place (alongside Richard Attenborough) and as British eccentric Quentin Crisp in a TV film of The Naked Civil Servant. Hurt also became immortalised as the victim of the notorious “chestburster” scene in the Ridley Scot space horror Alien.
Hurt worked steadily thereafter, with his best known roles including Winston Smith in the 1984 adaptation of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Stephen Ward in the true-life sex-and-politics yarn Scandal, and obsessed author Gile De’Ath in Love and Death on Long Island. A new generation discovered him via his roles as wandmaker Mr Ollivander in the Harry Potter films, and as the Doctor in the Doctor Who 50th anniversary specials.
Hurt died aged 77 in January 2017.
