John Hurt walking on the red carpet at the 8th edition of the Rome International Film Festival in Rome. Photo / AP
John Hurt was special. He was an icon of suffering and survival - a martyr of stage and screen.
He died all the time, and can't be dead. It sometimes felt like he was rasping his way to immortality. Hurt was always the one who got it worst in films;
it hurt, being John Hurt.
Think of him in Alien (1979) as poor Kane, who was the one to have a slimy proboscis shoved down his throat, a hideous organism clamped to his face for days, and another one primed to burst through his abdominal wall in the grossest childbirth scene in film history.
Of course Hurt was the attempted escapee from a hellhole of a Turkish jail in Midnight Express (1978), who winds up sliding into a heroin stupor.
Naturally he voiced Hazel, the main rabbit, in the unbelievably harrowing Watership Down (1978). Obviously he was Winston Smith, literature's ultimate loser, in the version of 1984 .
