Interview with John Hurt

Wednesday, 09 December 2009 18:54

John Hurt as Quentin Crisp - ITV John Hurt will reprise his role as English eccentric Quentin Crisp in An Englishman in New York, a funny and moving film from Leopardrama which picks up where the 1970's classic The Naked Civil Servant left off.

Sex in the City star Cynthia Nixon also joins the cast on location in the Big Apple. No stranger to the streets of Manhattan, Nixon will take the role of Penny Arcade, the performance artist and playwright who formed a close bond with Crisp in his latter years. The two created the long-running performance/interview piece, The Last Will and Testament of Quentin Crisp.

Out-spoken dandy Quentin Crisp sets off on the journey of a lifetime to the Big Apple. New Yorkers immediately embrace Quentin and his witty waspish ways, and before long he is being wined and dined by celebrities in every corner of Manhattan.

ITV A shining light of the chattering classes, Quentin befriends Patrick, a young artist who opens his eyes to the possibility that intimate human relationships - something Quentin has spent his life running away from - can work. But, as is so often the case with the maverick gay writer, Quentin cannot help but shock and, at a public event, he quips that the burgeoning AIDS crisis is "a fad". Quentin is suddenly dropped from high society.

An Englishman In New York airs on ITV1 on Monday 28^th December at 9pm.

Interview with actor John Hurt:

In 1968, gay icon Quentin Crisp wrote his autobiography titled The Naked Civil Servant. Detailing the life and times of the self termed ‘stately homo’ it was the story of one man coming of age and growing into old age in conservative England. An outrageous and flamboyant homosexual, in a much less tolerant era, Crisp became a best-selling author and a great British eccentric. In 1976, John Hurt portrayed the 68 year-old Crisp in the television film of his autobiography. The flamboyant breakthrough role catapulted both men into the limelight, winning Hurt a BAFTA, and turning Crisp into an overnight celebrity. The film was a seminal moment and the iconic role is one in which is arguably best remembered for.

“We made The Naked Civil Servant in 1976 and the whole sexual revolution, in terms of homosexuality, had not happened. It was a really shocking subject matter. The chemistry of it was that both filmmaker and audience came together at the same time so what the film had to say in terms of what Quentin had to go through in order to get what he had to say understood, happened at exactly the right moment. That is something you can’t time. You can’t say, ‘Let’s do it right now because it’s the right moment. We had no idea that it was the right time nor did the public. The public didn’t know they were going to be able to take it.”

Was he surprised by the reaction?

We were all surprised; I didn’t have to pay a cab fare for months and months. The drivers wouldn’t take any cash from me!

And my goodness, you’ve never seen a mail bag like it and wherever I went, people would stop me and say ‘it’s completely transformed my life’ There was one lady in particular who stood out for me’ she was an 80 year old PME of the Edinburgh Festival. Her husband had recently died so she had bought herself a television and she said, ‘I turned it on and it was the rugby so I turned to the other side and your film was on. I watched it from beginning to end and I have completely changed my opinion’. She was 80 years old and was obviously extremely bigoted. And she wasn’t just one singular person; the response was from all parts of society. People still come up to me and say, ‘That was the day that I came out.’ It’s a wonderful feeling to have been a part of something which moved people to such an extent.”

In the first part of his memoirs, Britain’s most famous homosexual depicted his life in anonymity. An Englishman in New York, directed by Richard Laxton tells the story of Crisp’s years of fame. What was it that encouraged him to revisit the role so long after the beloved original and were there any concerns on his part?

To be quite honest I had no intention of returning to it at all. I’d never really considered it. The Naked Civil Servant was such a seminal piece of television I thought it better to let sleep dogs lie; to leave it to the position that it enjoys rather than trying to add to it and dissipating the success.

Despite New Yorkers taking him to their hearts, Quentin suffered a very public backlash when a careless comment during one interview, that AIDS is merely ‘a fad’ resulted in him being vilified in certain quarters of the city’s gay community .

Quentin was a wit. And wit by nature and by definition is cruel. So it tends to hit quite hard. When trying to make a witty answer to that particular question, he really hit a duff one. And also one must remember that at that time, there just wasn’t the information on the disease there is today. People weren’t aware of just how dangerous AIDS was; the disease was in its infancy and while there had been a few deaths, I don’t believe that anyone thought it was going to become a worldwide pandemic.

And my suspicion as to why he never apologised, and it can only be a suspicion, is because he said ‘if I apologise, that makes it seem as though I don’t mean anything I say and I do’ As he says, nobody wants an explanation, the press don’t print explanations they only print apologies.”

His friends he made in New York were incredibly supportive at that time. Would you say Philip represented the closest thing to a soul mate that he had?

He was devoted to him. The real Philip certainly. Quentin became more reliant on him as he got older. There is nothing to say that he loved him. Quentin loved everybody as far as he was concerned. He loved the whole net of society.

As someone who has studied and known Quentin for a long time, would you say the public persona was very different from the private one?

I think he eliminated the private persona. Quentin practiced what he preached. The one thing about Quentin is that he was a philosopher in a sense but what is unusual about Quentin is that he lived his philosophy, unlike Karl Marx for instance.”

Quentin is eminently quotable, if you had to choose one thing what would be one of your favourite quotes of his?

Well there are so many to choose from and of course there are the famous ones or there are the personal ones, but perhaps one that sticks in my mind Would be when I asked him, ‘how are you enjoying New York?’ He said, ‘oh it’s wonderful, in New York three weeks is a meaningful relationship.”

Interview and introduction from the ITV Press Pack for An Englishman In New York.

Images are copyright of ITV.

An Englishman in New York airs on ITV1 on Monday 28^th December at 9pm.