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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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We all have our limitations.
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I think it's interesting to see how things come into and go out of fashion.
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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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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'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.
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In the States it's more and more difficult to get an independent film off the ground, and you certainly wont get the opportunity to play something like that in a studio movie.
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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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Society is constantly recalibrating, redefining what it considers to be moral and immoral.
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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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Elephant Man [movie] was much more difficult physically. This had a couple of days. It was quite tricky. I had my leg strapped up behind me and I am a little older now. It was all marvelous, though. He [Bong Joon-ho] is one of the most fabulous directors in the world.
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I've done lots of films with first directors, so it's not unusual for me.
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Pretending to be other people is my game and that to me is the essence of the whole business of acting.
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We're all far too afraid of being so arrogant to say Either you can or you can't.
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I find it difficult to say, like which child do you prefer the most, and its a sort of surface choice. I've never known how to quite answer that one adequately.
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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.
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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 don't like no confusion.
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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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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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It would be difficult to have any unfulfilled ambitions because I don't have any ambitions. I've never been that kind of performer.
John Hurt