John Hurt, a British actor who gave compelling depth to desperate, flawed and sometimes monstrously deformed characters in performances that captivated audiences and critics for more than five decades, has died. Two years later, Hurt received his first Oscar nomination, for his supporting role in “Midnight Express” as an English junkie abused by guards in a Turkish jail. Hurt played a Victorian-era Englishman whose grotesque disfigurement led to his years of exploitation as a carnival freak. “I had a very high voice and was quite small – and was rather pretty in those days,” he later told the Scotsman newspaper. “There isn’t such a thing as a regular guy,” Hurt once told the New York Times.

Source: National Post January 28, 2017 04:05 UTC