New York Yoyo

I’d love to claim that what I have done in my life is of my doing; but it’s not of my doing at all,’ John Hurt says. ‘I’ve blown around in the wind like a mad thing; influenced by this and that – like a piece of paper, like the boy in that scene in American Beauty watching a piece of paper blowing hither and thither.’ He pauses. ‘That’s a wonderful image, isn’t it?’

After a peripatetic, and often inebriated, journey that has seen him make more than 120 films – ‘or that’s what I’m told’ – win two Oscar nominations, suffer three divorces, make homes in Kenya and Ireland, get knocked down but, as the song has it, get up again, at the age of 69 John Hurt appears finally to have arrived at a place of contentment.

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