John Hurt, the twice-Oscar-nominated English actor whose film career spanned six decades and multiple iconic roles, has died at the age of 77, according to reports in several British newspapers, including The Daily Mail. His death was later confirmed in a statement to Variety. The cause of death was not immediately reported; Hurt was diagnosed in 2015 with pancreatic cancer, but in October of that year announced that he was “thrilled” to have had his final scan, “and it‘s all gone brilliantly.”
A former art student who enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1960, Hurt paid his dues in British television before breaking through in 1966’s A Man for All Seasons, opposite Paul Scofield and Orson Welles. He earned his first BAFTA award in 1976, for playing gay author and ranconteur Quentin Crisp in the TV film The Naked Civil Servant; that same year, he played notorious Roman emperor Caligula in the TV film classic I, Claudius.
As a trained actor with a resonant voice and an unmistakable screen presence, Hurt could be a leading man—as in the 1984 version of George Orwell’s 1984 and David Lynch‘s The Elephant Man—but may be more familiar to audiences as a supporting player, from the first, unlucky victim of the chestburster in 1979’s Alien to 2016’s Jackie, in which he plays a priest who has the ear of a mourning Jacqueline Kennedy. He earned Oscar nominations for his roles in 1979‘s Midnight Express, as a heroin addict doing time in a Turkish prison, and in The Elephant Man. He’ll also be remembered by a generation of children as the mysterious Mr. Ollivander, wand salesman, from the Harry Potter films. And thanks to a 2013 appearance as the War Doctor on Doctor Who, he will also forever belong to a legion of fans.
In the last decade of his career alone, Hurt worked with some of the world’s most fascinating directors, from Guillermo del Toro in the Hellboy series to Steven Spielberg on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to Lars von Trier on Melancholia to Joon-ho Bong on Snowpiercer.
“I can’t say I worry about mortality, but it’s impossible to get to my age and not have a little contemplation of it,” Hurt said in a 2015 interview, after his cancer diagnosis. “We’re all just passing time, and occupy our chair very briefly.”
