The gospel according to John Hurt

John Hurt’s familiar nicotine-honed voice – “Come on up… it’s on the next floor” – echoes down the wide staircase of the old-fashioned block of flats that was one of his first homes in London, along with fellow student Ian McShane at RADA, half a century ago. In his contrary way, he prefers not to call it Bloomsbury, but it’s as near as dammit; half a dozen cafés on his doorstep and close enough to some of the things that matter to him – galleries and theatres – to allow him to walk everywhere.

He’s 70 now: “Yes, I got there,” he says, with a dry smile. We last met, two decades ago, when he was seemingly happily married to his new wife, Jo Dalton, who had recently given birth to the first of their two sons, Sasha. He remembers our interview but when I mention the venue, the Groucho Club, where Hurt was a member and misbehaved on a regular basis, he says equably: “Well, that was a long time ago – all behind me now.”

That marriage – his third – foundered, according to his ex, on his drinking. When I ask him if he’s still married to his fourth wife, film producer Anwen Rees-Myers, he says: “Yes… unless she’s decided otherwise. She’s actually producing a film up in Norfolk [where the couple also have a home]. It’s a very small-budget film – £200,000 – and goes by the wonderful title of In Love with Alma Cogan.”

Weirdly, he doesn’t appear to have aged in the intervening time. Those crumpled, disappointed features – it’s a face made for his name – barely seem to have altered between his first portrayal of Quentin Crisp (who was, rather neatly, one of the naked models Hurt sketched as an art student, his first calling, at St Martins) way back in 1975 and his reincarnation last year.

I tell him that it was rather touching and surprising, flicking through the old newspaper cuttings, to see him as a young man in his twenties; he looked so very fresh-faced and innocent. “Well, I couldn’t get a drink before the age of 27 without being asked if I was 18. And then suddenly the portrait fell out of the attic… came clattering down the stairs with a crash.” A burst of gravelly laughter.

He is still whippet-slim and spry, without any apparent stiffness in his movements. But he has aged in other ways: a tendency to fuss about things, panic when he is out of his comfort zone – trendy Shoreditch, if our drive to the studio where he is to be photographed is anything to go by, is as terrifying to him as some war-torn ghetto – and, perhaps as he gets tired, he becomes increasingly querulous and, on occasion, downright rude.

But at first, Hurt could not be more friendly and accommodating. He withdraws to make coffee, leaving me to potter around his shuttered living room in which – like the rest of the flat (rather grander, one assumes, than his student one) – there is no natural daylight. It’s a comfortable room, with a couple of large sofas, kelims on the floor, and several wedding pics, from his most recent marriage.“I’m not a huge reader. I’d rather live

The largest wall is covered in photographs – one of him and Sir Ian McKellen, black and white and stylish; lots of Hurt in different roles, and a splashy, colourful child’s painting; over the fireplace is a large painting of a priest on a bench with a dalmatian dog, an invented landscape in the background, all bathed in a curious dappled light, and on one side, two small portraits of Hurt’s sons when they were little, and their father on the other. There are a couple of paintings by Hurt – a nude and a landscape – which are rather good, and another tiny, very dark abstract-looking work, which Hurt framed himself and turns out to have been painted by his nephew when he was 8.

We sit at the dining table, at one end of the room. Hurt makes several trips to and from the kitchen, bearing a cafetière, china cups and saucers, a jug of milk, a plate of chocolate biscuits. It’s all rather sweet and unexpected but, what with the crepuscular gloom and vases of shrivelled yellow roses, it does feel a bit like visiting a dowager aunt with Miss Havisham tendencies. At one point, Hurt morphs into Dame Maggie Smith, with that same drawn-out actorly diction – “extra-or-din-errrry” – and frozen look of startled umbrage.

Before we start, he takes out a mobile phone to check a message. The idea of Hurt even owning a mobile, let along texting – which he says he does – doesn’t quite fit. Just as one can’t imagine Lucian Freud or the late Francis Bacon, both old drinking pals of Hurt’s in Soho’s bohemian heyday, tweeting or playing computer games.

He is certainly still exceedingly dapper, with a style that never really dates. When we walk through one of the studios, with techno music booming, he cuts a dashing figure – in his black fedora, fitted black wool jacket, with its black and white spotted lining, a long tweed coat flung over his shoulders.

His address book is Smythson in Schiaparelli-pink leather (although he grumbles about their prices) and he’s had the same tailor for years, John Pearse – of the notorious World’s End boutique Granny Takes a Trip, who dressed the likes of Hendrix, Dylan and the Stones: “He makes superb overcoats.”

The usual deal with these interviews, particularly with actors, is that the subjects will want to promote their new project first and foremost and – once that’s over and done with – they’ll submit to unrelated questions.

But Hurt is a bit of a one-off; a loose cannon who should be a journalist’s dream although, judging from the recent cuttings and my own experience, it doesn’t always turn out that way. A few years ago, for instance, when he played Professor Oxley in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, he was withering about its creator, George Lucas: “It’s all to make Mr Lucas an extra billion, as if he needs it.”

While applauding this candour, I ask him whether it might not be considered to be biting the hand that feeds him, and he gets defensive: “I can only say what I think. I don’t dwell on it. I don’t go around trumpeting it. If someone asks me something, I’ll be as honest as one can be.”

He has been toiling away non-stop for months and the first film to appear will be a BBC Christmas drama – Whistle and I’ll Come to You, based on a short ghost story by M. R. James, in 1904, and adapted by Neil (Luther) Cross. Had he read the original? “I don’t read that sort of thing and it’s very, very difficult to read. I couldn’t stagger through all the story.” It’s less than eight pages, isn’t it? “Yeah, but it’s really tough – a very antiquated kind of writing.” (He has a point. Here is one example: “It was, as you might suppose, a person of antiquarian pursuits who said this, but, since he merely appears in this prologue, there is no need to give his entitlements.”)

Hurt’s character is a scientist, James Parkin, who has placed his beloved wife (played by Gemma Jones), suffering advanced dementia, into a home. Encouraged by her nurse, he has a break in a seaside hotel, as the only guest in the off season, where the couple stayed at the start of their courtship. On a walk along their favourite beach, his character sees a ghostly apparition and the haunting begins.

The piece is really a vehicle for Hurt, who is on the screen throughout, but I find myself in the rather odd position of coaxing him to say something positive about it. There are some nice lines in it, don’t you think? How about the scientist’s defence of rationalism to the young female receptionist, the sole member of staff, who clearly believes in the supernatural: “We are the ghosts of stars… There are mysteries we don’t understand but there are no spooks.”

“Oh, I love that, yes, I know…” And then there’s that poignant line, since the couple don’t have children: “A whole lifetime of loving someone all lost”? “Yes, it did have some good stuff in it,” Hurt admits. And, later, “I think the script was very well-written but it’s not a piece of social realism so you’re not looking for absolutely clarified motivations. Strange things happen but my justification was that all these beings are really creations of his own unhappy and anxious imagination. It’s all in his head and it’s a story of guilt because he’s left his wife in a home.”“I’m not a huge believer in marches but I thought opposing the Iraq war was of huge importance

He is nonplussed, I think, because I have seen a more recent DVD of the drama than he has. Hurt’s head is also full of other projects he has been working on: a terrific small part in Brighton Rock, opposite Helen Mirren; filming the previous night on the new Working Title film of John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; a short by an Icelandic director in which he plays a man who takes his life.

At one point, when I ask Hurt about something in Whistle…, he throws a desperate glance at the BBC publicist, and I ask him, “Why the horrified look?” to which he replies, “Because I can’t remember this.”

Everyone’s great fear, as he says, is losing their marbles as they get older. “My father went into a home for the last couple of years of his life – there was nothing you could do,” he says. “He was looked after by our housekeeper, Truda Wetherall, who was very Derbyshire and was responsible for me for the first five years of my life – and she’s dead now, too.”

His father, Arnauld, was a mathematician who became an Anglican vicar; one of Hurt’s two brothers, also academic, converted to Catholicism at Cambridge and is a monk.

“It created a huge rift in the family,” Hurt told me, the first time we met. “To my father it was as though his son was embracing the Antichrist. I’m sure he used that expression.”

Nevertheless, Hurt was packed off to an Anglo-Catholic prep school in the south, set up for “the poor sons of the clergy, so we got cheaper fees” at the age of 8, where he thrived on the theatricality of the High Church rituals. Then, having failed the common entrance exam three times, his parents sent him to a grammar school in Lincoln, where he was miserable and teased about his posh voice: “I deeply, deeply loathed it.” His accent soon changed, much to his mother’s chagrin, and even now he can, occasionally, sound very northern.

Both his sons, Sasha, 20, and Nick, 17, did not get on well with school either. “They’re like me: not interested. I think Nick will probably act, but he’s not quite ready to do it yet, and Sash is a painter. He’s getting his portfolio together to get into the Florence Academy; it teaches the craft of the Renaissance which is what intrigues him.

“He went to Byam Shaw and he was so unhappy there because they don’t teach you anything at all – absolutely nothing. You’re just expected to be a painter suddenly.”

Hurt went to St Martins after studying at Grimsby Art College but, like Sasha, became disillusioned with his course. In Hurt’s case, he dropped out to go to RADA. This wasn’t his only disillusionment. Up until the year he enrolled at art college, there had been an assumption that he – like the rest of his family – would go into the Church.

“I didn’t start thinking until I left school and, when I did, I went through a reactionary period,” he says. Reacting against your background’s orthodoxies, I clarify – partly as a little joke – rather than a right-wing period?

“Oh, no – not that.” A gratifying laugh.

“No, no, not right-wing… hahahaha.” He calls himself an agnostic rather than an atheist and is clearly uncomfortable with any creed that doesn’t allow for doubt. He says he doesn’t read much – “I’m not a huge reader. I’d rather live” – but he was fascinated by Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, albeit with a few caveats.

“Dawkins is obviously a completely brilliant fellow but, the trouble is, he’s so determined and so certain that he’s right that he makes the same mistakes as the Church,” Hurt says.

“It’s saying something is true when in fact he hasn’t quite got the scientific proof. I mean, of course he’s got all the scientific proof post Big Bang, but there’s always the question of what happened before the Big Bang. But I agree with him in that I’m quite sure there’s a solution and sure it’s a scientific solution, too, and I’m quite sure there is no such thing as a personal God.”

The very thought of religion seems to rile him. “I don’t have the actual facts but I understand that of the last hundred Nobel prizewinners only one of them was a Christian. All the rest were atheists and we take no notice. But we take notice of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Why?

“I’m constantly amazed that people in that position can believe what they believe with that kind of mind. Those extraordinary beliefs, which we think is all OK. We don’t think Muslim religion is OK, because it’s not ours. The reason for probably so much aggression and war in active religions is because that’s the most vulnerable area in any society… Because society knows very well it’s not true. In other words, that it has to be believed. If you attack something that is that vulnerable, one to one, you’ll get a punch in the face. If you think, society on society, you’ll have a war – it’s a natural reaction because you have no solid proof.”

If Hurt holds such views now – and it is the one subject that really animates him during our interview – one can imagine how, as a young man beginning to question and turn against religion, it must have been like throwing a bomb into his devout household. Perhaps his relationship with his father never recovered. Certainly, it appears to have been a complicated one; not helped by his decision to become an actor.“We can’t really conceive of a life without love because it’s part of our human condition, isn’t it?

His mother, who was herself keen on amateur dramatics, kept a scrapbook containing all the reviews and articles charting the upward trajectory of her son’s career. I ask Hurt if it’s true that his father threw this particular family archive away on her death. “Yes, he did actually.” How do you read that act? “Well, I read it as somebody who’s not terribly happy with themselves.” Was he, unlike your mother, not proud of you? “It wasn’t that at all, I don’t think. I don’t know…It’s very difficult to say because it’s all supposition. But I think there were certain jealousies, as well.”

He doesn’t choose to be more forthcoming about this – perhaps he’s just bored of repeating himself – but in previous interviews, Hurt has suggested that his father was jealous of the closeness between mother and son.

We move on to Brighton Rock. One of Hurt’s appealing traits is that if he believes in a project, regardless of the size of his role, he wants to support it. He can be bitchy about his fellow actors – Daniel Day-Lewis comes to mind – but he can also be generous. He raves about Mark Rylance, for instance, whom he missed in Jerusalem but saw in La Bête: “He’s extraordinary. Completely extraordinary. Such a tour de force. I’d be intrigued to see anything he’s in. La Bête is, of course, a very, very way-out character, in a sense, and I know a bit about them.” (And so he does, if you think of the roles for which Hurt is still best known: John Merrick in The Elephant Man; Quentin Crisp; Winston in 1984; Caligula; Raskolnikov.)

As for Sam Riley, who is impressive as Pinkie in Brighton Rock, he says: “He’s arrived, Sam, hasn’t he? But she [Andrea Riseborough, who is Rose] was spectacular.” As he says, “I didn’t have much to do in that one, quite honestly,” but the thing about Hurt is that even in a cameo role – he plays a bookie, Phil Corkery, with an unrequited tendresse for Helen Mirren’s character, Ida, also terrific as the owner of a genteel seafront tearoom – he’s always interesting and, crucially, believable. He’s rather like a male counterpart of Mirren; both actors have an unusual gift for winning our affection in a similarly unobtrusive way.

It’s only when I attempt to extrapolate on some of the themes arising from his characters’ lines, both in Whistle… and Brighton Rock, that we run into difficulties. Corkery is an old-fashioned romantic who, like the audience, wants to believe in the redemptive power of love. If we can be persuaded that Pinkie was even capable of loving Rose – and the new film of Brighton Rock is interesting because it plays with that possibility – then there is some small consolation, some fragment of hope. Since Hurt must know something about love – judging by his record of wives, as well as the 16-year relationship he had with Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot, who died in a riding accident in 1983 – one might expect him to have something to say about the subject. “Well… ugghhhhh… It’s a big subject.” Yes, but worthy of some discussion, wouldn’t you say?

“I mean, as far as the cosmos is concerned – of course, we don’t matter anyway – but as far as we are concerned, love is very important. Within the context of our lives. Life without love is hideous. To us,” he says, crossly.

I struggle to find a way of couching the question that will encourage Hurt to be a bit more forthcoming, but find myself meeting the most discouraging gaze of the BBC publicist and decide to take action. “OK, this isn’t working,” I tell her. “I’m going to have to turn my back on you, in the nicest possible way.” But in squeezing past the dresser behind me, a couple of photos (one framed, the other not) leaning against a shelf look as though they’re going to fall down. Hurt starts ululating: “Oh, oh, oh… Ah, ah, ah… Iyiyiyiyiiiiiiii!” “Oh sorry,” I say. “I’m just smashing up your flat.” (Thinking: “What is the matter with you, man?”)

Hurt is now quite discombobulated, as am I, and the interview takes a decidedly downhill turn. Trying a different tack, I say that since we are both parents of boys around the same age, isn’t it beholden on us to have some views on the subject of love. I mean, we can’t just say – can we? – “Oh, I haven’t got a clue.” (Even if that is what we think.) “Yes, of course, I’m not quite sure what you’re…foraging for.” OK, you’re 70, you’ve probably accrued some wisdom in your life; what have life’s lessons taught you about love?

“Well, we can’t really conceive of a life without love because it’s part of our human condition, isn’t it?” Well, I suppose some people may be incapable of loving? “I don’t think so. Well, some people of course are. But then some people commit suicide – that has to be somebody who is not capable of self-love.” So in order to love, you have to be capable of self-love? “Oh, I think so… and one shouldn’t be scared of that.”

Now, every question I ask is either too general or too specific for him. Even the most straightforward query confounds him, and he doesn’t look at me but at the PR woman behind me. “Are you political?” is met by astonishment: “Oh, God.” Do you care about politics? “Well… I’m intrigued… constantly intrigued… Well, of course…” Were you a Blair man (later, he says, “Hmmmm, I don’t trust that one”) or a Brown man? What do you think of the coalition? “Oh, you mean, down to those sort of specifics? Well, yes, I mean, well…”

You must be quite engaged because you went on the demonstration against the Iraq war. “It’s the only march I’ve been on. I’m not a huge believer in marches but I thought that was of such huge importance.” Did you go with other actors? “No, I went as a private individual – but I’m not an activist on the whole,” and then, almost as though he has made a decision to co-operate, “Yes, of course, I’m interested in politics. I don’t like to miss out on any kind of conversation, really.” (Well, he certainly could have fooled me.)

It’s not just reality television that fills him with loathing but the direction of television, in general. “I can’t watch the news any more – it’s all put to music and it just drives me insane. And you have somebody, you know, delivering the news and you get a picture of them walking down a street or from one office to another, and you think, ‘That’s not news!’

“And the graphics aren’t helpful at all. It’s just padding. It’s nothing to do with anything. And half the news now isn’t news at all – it’s like a magazine. It’s unwatchable! So I go back to good old Radio 4.”

I retreat into the surely uncontroversial terrain of his work. How does he feel about the theatre versus, say, the small screen or big screen? “It’s not versus,” he sneers. “They’re not in competition.” There isn’t time to argue about my choice of words, so I persevere: you have tended to do more of one than the other. “Well, because my life has gone that way I’ve done more film than anything probably.”

He played the Fool to Olivier’s Lear, but when I say that I’m excited by seeing Derek Jacobi in that role soon (at the Donmar and already sold out), there is a silence and then an almost laughably dismissive, “Very interesting.” Would he like to do Lear? “I don’t know. Hmm. I’m really not a classical actor. I prefer modern. But you never know until you do it. If you do it, suddenly you fall in love and become obsessed by it.”

A case in point was Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape: “I loved that. I’d never done any Beckett before and I didn’t treat it any differently. It just seemed to me to be like another play.”

He says that he’s done well over 150 films – which means that he’s performed in more than three movies a year, every year, since he was 25. As that oeuvre is largely unmemorable, I wonder how much c**p he turns down. “Well, you know, it’s a fallacy that one is being offered work all the time. People say, ‘Oh, you must be doing absolutely everything you want to do now.’ Some sort of idea that things are pouring in. It really doesn’t happen like that.” A bitter laugh. “There isn’t that much around.”

The car has arrived to transport us to the studio. Sasha walks into the room. He is tall and dark and has lovely manners. Father and son give each other a bearhug farewell. Hurt says it’s fine for me to continue the interview in the cab. He opens the door for me, like a gentleman, and then behaves like a total jerk. What makes it so tricky is that one moment he is a relatively normal human being, funny even, the next he’s beyond unpleasant. These mood swings, one after the other, are wearing, as you endeavour to stabilise the conversation.

I wonder, afterwards, whether this unpredictability may have something to do with Hurt’s former relationship with alcohol. It’s not that long ago – well, only six years – that Hurt was thrown out of a lapdancing club for being abusive to the staff. Presumably, he was not stone-cold sober then. I ask him, after yet another tetchy exchange, whether he’s become grumpier as he’s got older; less tolerant of things that he finds irritating. (Thinking: “You weren’t such a nightmare 20 years ago.”)

“Funny you should say that,” he says nastily. “I’m far less inclined to do interviews than in the past. We do far too many of them now, I think.” Irritated myself, I point out that it’s the quid pro quo, isn’t it: you do a project, you agree to publicise it. “Oh, sure, we wouldn’t do it for fun, would we?” What a look to give me, I say. (Thinking, to borrow from his most famous line: “I am not an animal. I am a human being. I am a woman.”) “Sit and talk about yourself? You’ve gotta be kidding.”

But don’t you get used to talking about yourself after so many decades of doing it? “I’m trying to think. I don’t have an answer. No.” Don’t you just look upon it as another role to play? “Yes. I don’t know. I suppose everybody has their own way of dealing with it.”

We talk about ageing. I mention Peter Hall’s 80th birthday in January and he says that John le Carré was on the set the previous day: “He’s 80, too. I thought Peter was older than that. Is he only ten years older than me?”

Is he relaxed about being photographed, I wonder. “Mmmm.” And then, he says to the driver in an aggrieved voice: “Where are we going?” The driver explains that we are in Shoreditch on the way to the studio. “What the hell are we coming up here for? Nobody comes up here!” You are not a Hoxton habitué, I take it, then? “No, I’m not very good on East London,” he says. I bet your boys know about it. “No, they’re Irish. They live in Ireland [with their mother].”

To distract him, since Hurt seems genuinely alarmed by this horrifying urban landscape – “Oh God!” he keeps exclaiming, with increasing agitation – I tell him about how Ian McKellen conducted my interview with him in his underpants. “He tends to do that,” he says. “He’s got a lot to swing about.”

Art, let’s talk about art. Do you like Paula Rego, for instance? “I don’t know who she is – she’s not the knitted eyebrow one, is she?” Do you go to many exhibitions? “Yes.” Have you seen the Gauguin? “I went last weekend but there were too many of them. I got the same feeling I got when I went to the Modigliani. Sash agreed with me.

“Very strange thing about Gauguin is that if he was better, he’d be worse.” Now we’re getting somewhere. Why? “Well, he’s no draughtsman at all. Quite clearly in a lot of the paintings he’s trying to draw it right but not succeeding. But he’s a wonderful colourist and very good at placement and composition.”

Do you find it easy sitting for a painter or do you get bored? “Well, I don’t think I’d like to sit for Lucian. It would go on for hours, days, weeks and weeks and weeks.” But the conversation would be interesting. He agrees and has just read the book, by one of Freud’s subjects, Man with a Blue Scarf.

At last, we’ve arrived at the studios. Hurt has uttered his final plaintive, “Oh, my God! Where are we?” The driver has given his last explanation as to why he has taken this or that route, to avoid the traffic or the cameras. Hurt: “Can’t do anything without being watched, can you? Even in Shoreditch.”

The make-up artist is ready. The stylist agrees that Hurt’s own style is quite stylish enough. The photographer is poised to shoot. The actor stands gazing into the camera and the BBC lady dismisses me for disturbing his line of vision. I step out into the mean streets of Shoreditch and breathe a huge sigh of relief.

The Times