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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

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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
Long
Would
Time
Stopped
Asking
Actor
Actors
Play

More quotes by John Hurt

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When you're really working well with a director then you can be as outrageous as you like and so can he. And there's no worry about it.
John Hurt
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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.
John Hurt
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My mother's father drank and her mother was an unhappy, neurotic woman, and I think she has lived all her life afraid of anyone who drinks for fear something like that might happen to her.
John Hurt
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I think you can get better in mathematics on a school level, but when you're talking about being a mathematician, I think that's definitely a gift of genes or whatever.
John Hurt
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My parents felt that acting was far too insecure. Don't ask me what made them think that painting would be more secure.
John Hurt
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Nudes are the greatest to paint. Everything you can find in a landscape or a still life or anything else is there: darkness and light, character dimension, texture. I painted heads too, of course.
John Hurt
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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.
John Hurt
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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.
John Hurt
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I've got plenty of train memories. I was sent to school when I was eight years old in 1948 in Kent. So I had to go through London in 1948, just after the war. Many ,many strange experiences.
John Hurt
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The common misconception is that we create films for ourselves. And I really don't do it for myself. I get stopped in the street by people saying, Do you mind if I say this about your work? Do I mind? I'm delighted. I do it for you. It's not for me. It's my living, yes, sure.
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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Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances. And it's being able - I can't tell you how one does, but one tries to read those circumstances correctly.
John Hurt
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Society is constantly recalibrating, redefining what it considers to be moral and immoral.
John Hurt
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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.
John Hurt
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Lotte Lenya was all emotion. She wasn't anything but emotion. She was not an intellectual.
John Hurt
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You have to learn to cut your cloth accordingly. But it seems to be a human weakness. Once you start making a lot of money, you just join in with everyone else. It's like the banks, and we've seen what happens there.
John Hurt
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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.
John Hurt
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I've done lots of films with first directors, so it's not unusual for me.
John Hurt
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[Alfred] Hitchcock was very interested in the image on the screen.As is any good cinema director. That is the language they speak. It is not literature, it is images on screen.
John Hurt
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Films don't take as long as people think. 'Harry Potter,' people always used to say, 'Well, my God, do you ever get any time to yourself?' I think I did, in 'Harry Potter,' over a 12 year period I did five days. So it's not exactly exhausting.
John Hurt