His Who’s Who entry does not so much as mention it. His first marriage, when he was 22, to an actress, Annette Robinson, lasted only two years. I remember thinking, that’s interesting, that’s something I would never see myself as. 'It’s one of those remarks that you collect through life. 'And he said, “Oh, he’s so aggressive.” I got very aggressive at that…’ He thinks for a moment.
![1984 john hurt boot stepping on face 1984 john hurt boot stepping on face](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/screen-shot-2018-06-04-at-2-09-19-pm.jpg)
He recalls somebody once asking the English teacher at school why he had cast Hurt as Lady Bracknell. 'Tough, hard poetry, if you like.’ (Aggression seems to have always been a weapon in Hurt’s acting armoury.
![1984 john hurt boot stepping on face 1984 john hurt boot stepping on face](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/threemeasures.jpg)
'It’s an enormously poetic piece,’ Hurt says with evident enthusiasm.
![1984 john hurt boot stepping on face 1984 john hurt boot stepping on face](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/geoffnicholls_blacksabbath_0.jpg)
There could be no greater contrast, for example, to the epicene, gentle-hearted Crisp than the role of 'old man Peanut’, which he plays in a new film to be released next month: 44 Inch Chest is a harrowing study in male violence, with Hurt as a vicious and malevolent old lag, spitting out expletives as he bullies and cajoles a friend (played by Ray Winstone) into exacting retribution on a waiter who has slept with his wife. It is hard to imagine him playing light comedy or a romantic leading man, although his emotional range as an actor is extraordinary. Hurt’s best roles have been characters who are outside society, 'outside of love’, as he puts it – the vulnerable, the flawed, the tormented: Quentin Crisp, Winston Smith in 1984, John Merrick in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (a performance that moved Lynch to describe Hurt as 'the greatest actor I have ever worked with’).