John Hurt

Nudes are the greatest to paint. Everything you can find in a landscape or a still life or anything else is there: darkness and light, character dimension, texture. I painted heads too, of course.

My parents felt that acting was far too insecure. Don’t ask me what made them think that painting would be more secure.

I remember once when I told Lindsay Anderson at a party that acting was just a sophisticated way of playing cowboys and Indians he almost had a fit.

It’s quite a dangerous career move to go wilfully on making films that may not find a distributor.

I turn up in Los Angeles every now and then, so I can get some big money films in order to finance my smaller money films.

As Beckett said, it’s not enough to die, one has to be forgotten as well.

It would be difficult to have any unfulfilled ambitions because I don’t have any ambitions. I’ve never been that kind of performer.

I never quite understand why we watch the news. There doesn’t really seem much point watching somebody tell you what the news is when you could quite easily listen to it on the radio.

I mark a script like an exam, and I try not to do anything under 50 per cent. Similarly with the part. And also film is a peculiar thing, parts don’t necessarily read in script form anything like as well as they can do when it comes to materialising.

If you do an interview in 1960, something it’s bound to change by the year 2000. And if it doesn’t, then there’s something drastically wrong.

I put everything I can into the mulberry of my mind and hope that it is going to ferment and make a decent wine. How that process happens, I’m sorry to tell you I can’t describe.

I have lots of favourite memories but I can’t say that I have a favourite film.

Also the wonderful thing about film, you can see light at the end of the tunnel. You did realise that it is going to come to an end at some stage.

It’s an immensely competitive business, and I can tell you the older you get, the parts are fewer, and the people who are proven performers are greater.

If I’m in theatre, cinema doesn’t even cross my mind. Similarly when I’m making a film, theatre doesn’t cross my mind.

My mother’s father drank and her mother was an unhappy, neurotic woman, and I think she has lived all her life afraid of anyone who drinks for fear something like that might happen to her.

I never had any ambition to be a star, or whatever it is called, and I’m still embarrassed at the word.

I am not an enormous believer in research being the be-all and end-all. I get suspicious when I read about actors spending six months in a clinic, say, in order to play someone who is sick.

Pretending to be other people is my game and that to me is the essence of the whole business of acting.