No Longer in a World O'Hurt

Or

Hurt's Empire of Dirt

John Hurt, who was so good an actor it was worth screwing up the careful numbering system of Doctor Who, has died at the age of 77. Best remembered for getting face raped and giving birth to an angry jumbo shrimp in Alien and having the sense of humor to do it again for Spaceballs, Hurt was generally regarded as one of the finest actors of his generation. He was the far less entertaining (aka non-Bob Guccioned) Caligula in BBC’s I, Claudius. He earned Oscar nominations as a smack-addicted inmate in a Turkish prison in Midnight Express and allegedly as the guy under all the makeup in The Elephant Man. He was also the rat-averse Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Hellboy’s handler, the only thing worth watching in Contact as a brilliant and reclusive terminally ill billionaire, and Indy’s alien-addled friend Harold Oxley in the shark-jumping, fridge-nuking, franchise-killing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Hurt’s cancer diagnosis was one of many catastrophes to befall Terry Gilliam’s legendary development disaster The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, as he had been slated to star in the 8th attempt to make the movie. He was revealed as the man who ended the Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks as the War Doctor in The Time of the Doctor, though all 13 of The Doctor’s incarnations were later able to hide Gallifrey in a moment in time (even if the War Doctor tragically would not retain the memory when he returned to his own time stream and still thought he had killed billions in order to end the war. Yes, I am that big a geek.) Upsetting such a critical element of the long-running show’s mythology required an actor of Hurt’s stature to quell the show’s vocal lunatic fans, while seeing Hurt’s world-weary doctor rolling his eyes at the youthful overexuberance of Matt Smith and David Tennant was just great fun. His last performance will be in later this year in Darkest Hour, as Nazi-appeasing British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.