The movie John Hurt called his most underrated: “I thought it would’ve been more successful”
Beginning his career in the 1960s, John Hurt gave plenty of incredible performances throughout the decade, rising to particular prominence in the late 1970s when he earned various accolades for his role in Midnight Express.
A part in 1979’s Alien further immortalised him in the mainstream, with his role as Kane, whose fate is sealed when his chest explodes, in a simply unforgettable scene, but it was his next role that was arguably the greatest of his career, seeing him win a Bafta and earn an Oscar nomination.
It was 1980, and Hurt was cast in the prosthetic-heavy role of John Merrick in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, where he delivered a terrific performance that highlighted him as one of the best actors of his generation, bringing tenderness and raw emotion to a part with limited opportunity for facial expression. Merrick wasn’t going to be an easy character to master, considering that he was based on a real person, too, but Hurt did the character justice, and The Elephant Man remains one of Lynch’s most emotive films.
In the coming years, Hurt appeared in everything from Nineteen Eighty-Four to the Harry Potter series and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but there was a specific movie that emerged in the late 1990s that he believes to be his most underrated. In fact, he thought it would be more successful than it was, even if he did scoop up a nomination for ‘Best Performance by a British Actor in an Independent Film’ from the British Independent Film Awards.
Written and directed by Richard Kwietniowski, the indie film was made on a budget of just over $2million, and it actually did make a slight profit, grossing $3m at the box office overall. Still, it hasn’t endured as one of Hurt’s most memorable movies, simply because it was a much smaller project compared to those that he had become known for.
Love and Death on Long Island is a tale of obsessive infatuation, with the actor playing Giles De’Ath, a Luddite, who accidentally stumbles into the wrong cinema screening, instead catching a teen movie starring a man named Ronnie, played by Jason Priestley, with whom Giles becomes all-consumed, to the point of even travelling to the movie-actor’s home town in the hopes of meeting him.
It was a rather subversive project for Hurt to take on, but he was fascinated by the script and wished it had been seen by a wider audience. Sadly, that’s usually just the way it goes with independent films.
Talking to Diane Rehm, Hurt revealed, “I’m sometimes surprised that things didn’t do so well,” adding, “One of my favourite films was Love and Death on Long Island made by Richard Kwietniowski. And I, with the reviews that we got, I thought that it would be…it would’ve been much, much more successful than it in fact was. I don’t think it was terrifically well sold, and I don’t think it was terrifically well dealt with when it came to being shown, distributed.”
The actor continued, “I think those things went against it, but it got amazing reviews. But the strange thing, of course, because it didn’t do well enough, it didn’t get a lock in with any of the awards, which is really quite surprising.”
