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You can see areas where maybe you got a bit lazy, perhaps, or you see when you were really on form. I think an actor is very like a sportsman in that respect. You have periods where you're in terrific form.

John Hurt

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John Hurt
Age: 77 †
Born: 1940
Born: January 22
Died: 2017
Died: January 27
Actor
Character Actor
Explorer
Film Actor
Stage Actor
Television Actor
Voice Actor
John Vincent Hurt
Sir John Vincent Hurt
Sir John Hurt
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Bits
Sportsman
Maybe
Terrific
Actors
Lazy
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Areas
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Periods
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More quotes by John Hurt

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If you put on an Oscar Wilde [play], it will interest those who are interested in Oscar Wilde. But it won't interest anybody else, because they won't get that wit.
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We all have our limitations.
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People are not what they seem to be according to their looks.
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I love working with Lars [von Trier]! I've worked with him three times. I did the narration of Dogville and Manderlay.
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It's quite interesting, looking back at the first one [film about Harry Potter], nobody knew whether or not it was going to be successful as a film. The books were of course already very successful, but that's happened before, where the books were successful and the films weren't at all. But it turned out that they were.
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Very broadly speaking, you can put directors into two areas: One for whom you work, and the other with whom you work. And I prefer the latter, for obvious reasons.
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By the time I came to do the final ones [Harry Potter's film], I was working on something that was massively successful. There was a huge difference in indulgence and all sorts of stuff. A very big difference in peoples' attitudes. They were very pleased with themselves. In human terms, it was quite interesting to see the difference.
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The clergy is in the same business as actors, just a different department.
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Anything which retains interest is optimistic. When the characters become disinterested, it's pessimistic. Does that make sense?
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Often I don't read novels. The script is more important, that's the springboard to your imagination, really. Peripheral information can be interesting to read but you can't use it when it's not in the script.
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In anything really, it's finding the reality. You can't be 'real,' but you can create a reality. And that created reality is what the audience believes in. And that's essential. Because if the audience doesn't believe that, they're never going to trust you. And if they don't trust you, you can't lead them up the mountain.
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Be true to what you want to say, or whatever style it is that you've chosen or genre you've chosen. Do it well! My criteria always has been that the piece must stand the chance of succeeding on the level it's intended to succeed on.
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Lotte Lenya was all emotion. She wasn't anything but emotion. She was not an intellectual.
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The British tradition, basically, is to go to the character. And the Hollywood tradition, shall we say, is basically to take the character to the performer.
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I'm besotted by [Kirsten Dunst] now. I think she's just wonderful. I can't think for a second that however much she'd worked in America, she would never have had the chance to play [a role in Lars Von Trier's 'Melancholia' ] like that. You have to get outside of the States to do something like that.
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I've spent a great deal of my life doing independent film, and that is partly because the subject matter interests me and partly because that is the basis of the film industry. That's where the film-makers come from, it's where they start and sometimes its where they should have stayed.
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I am not an enormous believer in research being the be-all and end-all. I get suspicious when I read about actors spending six months in a clinic, say, in order to play someone who is sick.
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I find myself more interested in producing. Not because I'm interested in the financial side of it, but just getting together the right elements to make a film, that side of production. I would not be good on the financial side. It would be a disaster from the beginning.
John Hurt
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We're all far too afraid of being so arrogant to say Either you can or you can't.
John Hurt
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I stopped asking a long time ago, why would you want me to play that? I'm an actor. That's what I do.
John Hurt