JOHN HURT:-The 77-year-old
actor, known for his world-weary face and the economy of his emotional
expression, died Wednesday, though
it wasn’t for the first time. Over the course of a six-decade career that
included roles as a cowboy and an astronaut and garnered Oscar nominations for
playing a man with severe physical deformities in “The Elephant Man” and an imprisoned heroin addict “Midnight Express” Hurt went through the motions of perishing
more than 40 times.
On screen, Hurt
died by hanging, shooting, fire, explosion, drowning and falling off a cliff.
Not once but twice, aliens climbed out of his stomach: in the 1979 “Alien,” and again in the 1987 sci-fi parody “Spaceballs.”
“I
have died in so many spectacular ways,” Hurt said in a prescient interview with New Zealand’s Stuff website last year, “and I remember shooting
them all, too. I imagine all those deaths will flash in front of me when I’m on
my death bed, faced with the real thing.”
Hurt,
who won a Golden Globe and four BAFTA awards, may be best known to
young audiences as Mr. Ollivander, the purveyor of magic wands in the “Harry Potter” series. He was born in
Derbyshire, England, in 1940 and
began acting in his early 20s,
working steadily and to great acclaim, most recently as a priest in “Jackie” alongside Natalie Portman.
Hurt’s portrayal of former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain in the
historical drama “Darkest Hour” is scheduled to hit theaters in November. A
2014 analysis of movie deaths by
Kyle Hill for Nerdist found that Hurt died on screen at
least 43 times, making him one of
the most frequently killed actors ever.
According to Hill,
Hurt died in over 30 percent of his
roles. Perhaps Hurt’s most emotional death scene was in 1980s “The Elephant Man,”
a gripping four-minute sequence set to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.”Here’s hoping that
the final breaths of a man who gave use so many moving ones on screen were
marked by comfort and peace.
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