Dostoyevsky seems to have been writing expressly for Hurt: Rodya Raskolnikov, hungry, desperate, at the end of himself, his mouth an open black scowl. He may be a murderer, but he'll give all his money to a starving family. It's hard to imagine an actor who can accommodate the enormous emotional span of Dostoyevsky, but Hurt is no prude, and his compassion for the tortured arrogance of Raskolnikov is equal to the author's.

His eyes, before he kills the old woman, are that of a trapped rabbit -- helpless, feverish. He strikes the blows as if they were to save his own life. Morally repellant as the moment is, Hurt has fully inhabited the role -- he embodies wretchedness at its most terrible extreme. He aches to confess, to anyone; he wears the crime like a purulent rash; Hurt forces us to relate to his reckless, compulsive self-endangerment.

Hurt's torment has the fluttering violence of a death rattle; every movement is dictated by inexorable, irreversible stimuli, just as N follows M; his imaginative craft lays the perfect foundation for the point of the pyramid that converges into the sublime.

All this is the more phenomenal when one considers that Hurt didn't bother to read the book until after he shot the miniseries.

"I think it would be very difficult to play somebody if they didn't think they had any virtues or redeeming characteristics. You can play an unlovable character because society doesn't find them easy to love, but somewhere deep inside most people, who do not commit suicide, is a love for themselves."

If Hurt is best known for anything, it is the scene in Ridley Scott's "Alien" (1979) where his stomach explodes in volcanic yellow snot and releases a creature that looks, in Bette Midler's words, "like a penis on a skateboard." Any half-decent actor could have done it -- it was all plastic, writhing and screaming, but something about John Hurt's particular brand of suffering made it iconic. He looks his sexiest and most comestible here, in the first shot of the film, in which he gracefully wakes from his sleep-pod in a large cotton diaper, looking every inch the baby Jesus in his crèche. He seems to be in his prime: fit, sleek, great hair. I love this film, if for nothing more than the epic sets by surrealist H.R. Giger and the image of John Hurt chain-smoking in outer space.

"The Elephant Man" (1980), certainly Hurt's most celebrated leading role, has him so entirely mummified in prosthetics (seven hours of makeup every shooting day) that he must act mainly through his tremulous, pathetic voice and sinus schlucking:

"I ... amb ... NOT ad adimal! (shluck) ... .I amb a humid being!"

But the role of John Merrick is the only one in which Hurt is truly innocent, and he is transcendent. It is already such a moving story: a person outwardly horrifying and inwardly pure, profoundly abused, who retains goodness and refinement throughout his victimization. A Christ figure, the meekest and gentlest of all God's creatures.

John Merrick's alienation from normal society, the pain of the monster, is uncomplicated: the true art of this role is in his terrible, insupportable happiness. When he is rescued from the sideshow, the simplest kindnesses capsize him. He breaks down when a woman offers him tea, because "nobody so beautiful has ever been so kind" to him.

Hurt is overly modest and self-effacing in regard to his craft, which he shrugs off as merely imaginative pretending: "I remember once when I told Lindsay Anderson at a party that acting was just a sophisticated way of playing cowboys and Indians he almost had a fit ..."

He shrugs it off, but when the Elephant Man is given a home, it is a mercy that cannot be adequately put into words, or contained: "My friend, oh, my friend, thank you, oh, thank you, oh, my friend, thank you" -- this is the keening of painfully acute happiness, and an actor of anything less than ingenious imaginative powers could easily have killed it with hack sentimentality.

The real hot poker in the soul is the penultimate scene, when Merrick is taken to the theatre for the first time. It is a classic David Lynchian visual delight: tinselly, Brobdingnagian and sarcastic, but Hurt does the infant wonder in Merrick's eyes to perfection: you are witnessing a man who is gazing at heaven. We can see the wrongs of Merrick's life being abruptly righted, his suffering rewarded; this poor, wretched man-child takes such deep, uncynical pleasure in the flickering paper dazzle of the stage, his heart is miles open, his joy is as insupportably huge as his enlarged skull. Anthony Hopkins practically backs away from him; his gratitude is so intense as to be nearly impossible to accept.

It is the test of an actor's emotional IQ to relate to a being so ... well ... holy. Not everyone can play an unguarded, wide-open soul, naked before love, trusting to the point of Prince Myshkin-like idiocy -- a welcome mat for the brutes of the world to wipe their feet on, but a beacon, lighting the way to the Perfected Inner Man. It is said of the mystic actress Eleanora Duse that toward the end of her career she looked like a small sun onstage; such was the brightness of her spirit.

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