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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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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
Take
Performer
Performers
Basically
British
Tradition
Hollywood
Shall
Character

More quotes by John Hurt

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I think it's interesting to see how things come into and go out of fashion.
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My fathers a clergyman, and he was in the mission field for a certain amount of time in British Honduras, which is now Belize.
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I've done lots of films with first directors, so it's not unusual for me.
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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.
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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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It's a great relief to feel that you're working with someone rather than for someone. You don't feel that you're being tested, as it were.
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I was keen on sports-that's how my nose got this way. It's not actually broken the nose was just pushed up a little bit and moved over. It's an aquiline nose, quite Irish.
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Bong Joon-ho is enormously sensitive to performance. He knows what he needs to see and that's all he needs to shoot. He is so daring. We don't do that in the west. We shoot everything.
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I left drama school and went straight into a 10-week film for which I was paid £75 I might say, which for 1962 was one heck of a lot of money.
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I loathed school. I don't have an academic mind, and besides I was so bored by my teachers! How teachers can take a child's inventiveness and say yes, yes, in that pontifical way of theirs, and smother everything!
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The truth is rarely true and never simple.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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If it's a low-brow bawdy comedy, it's got to stand the chance of succeeding as such. If it's an intellectual piece, a drama, and so forth. And of course, once you've determined the level of the piece, do it the best you know how. And then don't make concessions. To audiences, or to pursestrings, or whatever.
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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.
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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 think [ Lars Von Trier] is a fantastic filmmaker. No question. You've got to be ready for him. He's sharp and he's got a sharp tongue and I love that. He doesn't mind it back.
John Hurt