He hated what he called his 'high anglo-Catholic' prep school, but it did introduce him to his vocation, at age 9, when he was cast as the girl in Maeterlinck's 'The Bluebird.' Playing the role, as he told Geoff Andrew of the U.K. He has described his childhood as unhappy, and his young self as 'solitary' and 'negative.' His father was a Church of England clergyman who thought going to films was 'common' Hurt didn't see a movie until he was 8. Serve chilled, in the skull of your enemy.īorn in 1940 in Shirebrook, England, Hurt lived until the age of 12 in a small coal-mining village named Woodville.

I attempt, Dear Reader, to deliver you a 180-proof jigger of the exquisite John Hurt. I imagine that his fans wouldn't want to molest him so much as respectfully throw back icy shots of his distilled essence - a toast, a swallow, and a wincing, hearty aurgh! Hurt is a toxic luxury, delicious as a nasty fruit brandy - an after-dinner vice of giddy, overpriced pleasure. Men and women both want him, though for what, exactly, I'm not sure - it's hard to imagine being physically comfortable enough near him to actually touch him. Yet to gaze upon John Hurt, in almost any role, is to feel a drooly adoration he is irresistible. The characters he plays are generally weak, immoral, murderous, slimy or insane. He has never, in any role, looked particularly masculine. His body, when it isn't a little overindulged around the abdomen, is scrawny. Even in his early films, he has eye bags and looks like he put on a face that was at the very bottom of his laundry basket. He has dark, verminous little eyes, a smirky little mouth full of nicotine-varnished teeth, and that British complexion that evokes a poached worm.

John Hurt shouldn't work as a love object - it is counterintuitive to the general rules of attraction.

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