There's something disturbing about John Hurt. That familiar Mount Rushmore face seems to have ironed itself out. It was once compared to a komodo dragon – even his lines seemed to have lines – but today he looks peachy as a schoolboy. You've been on the Botox, haven't you? He roars with how-dare-you laughter. "Nah! Hahahaha! No. Don't say that. That would be awful. Not in a million years would I do that." He's got a point: take away the cracks and creases, and his job prospects would diminish no end. His face is one of the most distinctive in the movies. Almost as distinctive as his voice, dripping with honey and acid, often at the same time. Look, he admits, there might well be a reason for his fresh-faced appearance – he has led a more restrained life in recent years. He sips his coffee. Only coffee these days. "Yesssss, it got to a state where it was quite bashed up."
Hurt, 69, has just returned to the role that made his name – Quentin Crisp. It's 34 years since he first played the gay icon in Jack Gold's film The Naked Civil Servant. It was an unforgettable performance in one of the great TV dramas – all louche defiance, feline elegance, catty wit and understated loneliness. Crisp became a celebrity after the film, Hurt became a star.
Crisp once said, "I told Mr Hurt it was difficult for actors to play victims, but he has specialised in victims. When he stopped playing me, he played Caligula, which was only me in a sheet. Then he played The Elephant Man, which was only me with a paper bag over his head." Crisp had a point – Hurt has a formidable line in victims: as the stuttering, schlurping, hideously deformed John Merrick in The Elephant Man, he is heartbreaking ("I amb dot an elephant! I amb dot an adimal! I amb a human being! I amb a man!"); as prematurely wizened Winston Smith in the adaptation of Orwell's 1984, he provides a terrifying portrait of paranoia. In the movie Scandal, about the Profumo affair, he plays the caddish osteopath Stephen Ward with a cackling charm that makes it so much more painful when the world closes in on him. One of his favourite roles is Giles De'Ath in the adaptation of Gilbert Adair's Love And Death On Long Island – an ageing gay author humiliatingly obsessed with a young man.
Although Hurt featured in A Man For All Seasons as far back as 1966, one of his first leading roles came in 1971 in 10 Rillington Place, alongside Richard Attenborough's unctuous psychopath John Christie. Hurt is brilliant as Timothy Evans – a Welshman hanged in 1950 for murdering his daughter, then posthumously pardoned. Hurt's Evans first appears as a wife-beating, Jack-the-lad fantasist – a character for whom we have zero sympathy. As the film progresses, Hurt cracks up, his face dissolves into a cascade of snot and tears, his skin becomes so pale it's almost translucent, and his thuggish abuser morphs into the ultimate victim. It's a devastating performance. On second thoughts, perhaps Hurt's executive officer Kane in Alien is the ultimate victim – Kane is the host for the alien, and dies when the phallic monstrosity bursts from his chest.
It was in 1975 that he first played Quentin Crisp, a man every bit as queenly as Timothy Evans had been brutish. "It changed the business's perception of me as a performer. It was what you call a big break. I was warned not to do it – they said you'll never work again, it was such a dodgy subject at the time."
But Hurt, director Jack Gold and writer Philip Mackie were determined the project would go ahead. "We'd sworn, like the Three Musketeers, that if we got this going, we'd drop everything and make it. Well, suddenly Verity Lambert took it up with Jeremy Isaacs at Thames Television, and we had to drop everything. I was supposed to be going to New York with Tom Stoppard's play Travesties and the director, Peter Wood, tore strips off me. Those were the days when directors were directors – they were big beasties. He said, 'How dare you take a poxy little English television instead of a third lead on Broadway.' I said, 'I'm terribly sorry, but I don't think it is a poxy little English television. I think it's a terrific piece, and I have to do this.'"
In An Englishman In New York, Hurt plays the older Crisp who emigrates to America in his 70s. Like the younger Crisp, he's a supremely complex character. After decades of being taunted in London, he finds himself ecstatically liberated in an anything-goes New York that embraces his wit and exhibitionism. But things gradually sour. The dandy bohemian, who had been regarded as a radical in an era when homosexuality was still fiercely closeted, comes to be seen as a reactionary by New York's politicised gay community. In a world where gay men are out and proud and sexually belligerent, Crisp talks of his homosexuality as a curse and Aids as a fad. Not surprisingly, it doesn't go down well.
Hurt's performance is, once again, superbly nuanced. Crisp is both of his time and a relic, an adored showman and loveless loner, as infuriating as he is admirable. More than anything, Hurt conveys the cruelties of old age for a man who had prided himself on his youthful beauty – the shoes that pinch so tight he can't walk, the arthritis and the thinning, shoulder-length hair wrapped pitifully round his head to give the impression that age has not withered him.
When Hurt was asked to reprise the role, he was tempted to reject it: "My first instinct was to let sleeping dogs lie." But then he read the script, written by Brian Fillis, liked it, and got the Crisp bug all over again. He'd spent so many years with Crisp in one way or another, it would have been perverse to let somebody else play him. After all, for so many people, John Hurt is Quentin Crisp.
Although Hurt's life has been so different from Crisp's, there were similarities and overlaps. After Grimsby School of Art he went to St Martins school of art, where he painted Crisp who modelled nude for the students – not that he knew who Crisp was back then. At the same time, he hung around many of the same Soho haunts as Crisp had done all those years earlier. And, like Crisp, for much of his life he felt he didn't belong.
Another new film gives more clues to Hurt's nature. In Jim Jarmusch's The Limits Of Control, Hurt plays Guitar, a travelling philosopher from the university of babbling nonsense. Beautifully shot, great music, dreamy cast (Hurt, Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Gael García Bernal), the only problem is the story. There isn't one. Sure, it's about a hit man, but that's all we learn. In fact, we probably learn more about Hurt from his 90-second cameo than we do about any of the characters. Jarmusch hand-picked him to play the roving bohemian rasping about the origins of Bohemia.
Yes, Hurt says, bohemian is an important word for him. "If I was going to affiliate myself to any lifestyle, it would be along that way." What does bohemian mean? "It's to beat the middle-class mentality, isn't it, really? That's what you're allying yourself with." That was important to him? "It was huge. I was brought up in the manse. I didn't feel I ever fitted there – if you can fit there. You're automatically an outsider if you're the son of a vicar."
Hurt came from a family of working-class high achievers. His father studied maths at Cambridge before becoming an Anglican clergyman; his mother was a draughtswoman. He had a good sense of humour, but was strict and dogmatic; she was aspirational and didn't like young John playing with the "common" local children. Hurt felt stifled by the attitudes, the godliness, the smallness of their lives. The second world war had turned everything on its head – after all the destruction and austerity, Hurt belonged to a new generation that wanted to experiment and create.
At eight he moved from Derbyshire to a boarding school in Kent where he discovered acting. He was unusually pretty, showed an aptitude, and got to play some of the great female leads.
By 16, he was bored with school, had given up on God and was headed for art school. His new-found agnosticism would have caused ructions in the family were it not for the fact that his older brother Michael had created a far bigger shock wave by joining the Catholic church. "That was the blackest day in the family history ever; that was my brother joining the Antichrist. It acted as a complete smokescreen to my agnosticism, so I got away with it." His brother went on to become a monk at Glenstal Abbey in Ireland, then left the order and fathered three children, before returning as Brother Anselm.
It was at St Martins that Hurt got his introduction to London's bohemians. He frequented the Colony Room, the famously dissipated private drinking club, and befriended Francis Bacon. Hurt still paints today, and starts to mumble and rub his hands together when I ask what his paintings are like. "I, erm, ummm, I'm not sure where it's going to lead. They are figurative, but not in a naturalistic way. I hate describing them." He smiles. "I'm still finding my way with paint."
Hurt doesn't much like talking about himself. But, boy, does he like to talk. He adores conversation. That's his big thing, these days. So he talks about art. The trouble is, he says, ever since Picasso, art has been primarily about ideas rather than the end product. "Picasso was hugely innovative, and, wow, did he have facility, amazing ability, but I don't think he painted a masterpiece."
And he talks about the relationship between science and godlessness. "Of the last 100 Nobel prize winners for physics, only one was a Christian, all the rest were atheists." What a weird fact to know, I say. He laughs. "I'm interested... It's something Richard Dawkins brings into his book The God Delusion." Hurt so wanted to agree with Dawkins, but found him every bit as dogmatic as his father had been, only in the other direction. "I liked his early books, then when I read The God Delusion, I thought, you're making a huge mistake, you're being so strident and you can't back it up. I kept thinking, you haven't proved a thing, and you're going on about science having to have the proof. We still don't know what the business of life is, and I'm perfectly happy not to know."
And he talks about how cultures constantly evolve, and how Britain has changed in his time. Now punk, he says, here was a movement he could understand . Before that all the youth movements were idealistic, even rose-tinted, but not punk. "Its philosophy was totally two fingers up to everything, fuck you. You don't want us, fuck you, too, bollocks. Well, we don't want you too. 'I did it maaaaaaaaaa way.'" He spits a decent impression of Sid Vicious. "That was enormously significant to me. Punk recognised the fact that the establishment had no room. There's no point in saying you've got the establishment wrong because they hadn't got the establishment wrong, they'd got it absolutely dead on." He's fabulous when he gets into grumpy old anarchist mode. But even then he wrong-foots you a moment later by saying he has a soft spot for the Lib Dems.
Somehow, he says, the world seems so much more conservative and timorous than it was. Take drink. "What worked in the early 60s certainly wouldn't work now and what works now certainly wouldn't have worked in the early 60s. We were crawling away from the gargantuan horror that was the second world war and getting into an area where you could be creative again in the 60s. I think Peter O'Toole put it well. He said the thing about alcohol at that time was we didn't drink for the sake of drink, we drank to channel it for some thing else." Really? "It was true. It created a kind of excitement, a platform of excitement from which there was a huge amount of artistic energy."
And is alcohol still used creatively? "No, I don't think so. I don't think anything comes out of it that is positive. Everything's changed. Go to a meal at lunchtime and you see one glass of wine over there and one glass of wine over here. In the 60s, there would have been so many bottles and God knows what going on. It was a different way of approaching it all. If you approached it that way now, you'd be considered an old joke. Fuck off, they'd say."
Hurt knows what he's talking about when it comes to drink. He was famous for it – even acquired a reputation as a drunk and a hell-raiser. But, he says, it wasn't justified. "No, some of my friends were. O'Toole was a friend of mine, he was a hell-raiser, but I wasn't. And Richard Harris, he was, too." The Irish crew. Hurt was a little upset recently when his past was explored in the television show Who Do You Think You Are? and it was revealed that he didn't actually have Irish ancestry as he'd always assumed.
However much he protests, he wasn't always as quiet as he likes to think. In 2004 he was thrown out of the lap-dancing club Spearmint Rhino for being abusive to staff. On reflection, he says, he never considered himself a proper drunk. "No, because I had a fail-safe. I always had work to save me, and I worked throughout." Did he get bored with the lifestyle? "Errrrrmmmm, yes. Yes. Yeah. Actually, it became unpleasant." It or him? "Well, it and me, I guess."
The drinking was only part of a somewhat turbulent private life. Hurt has always believed in the institution of marriage. So much so that he's married four times. Is it because he's an incurable romantic or has a high boredom threshold? He rubs his hands again and says things are never quite so simple. "If life were that easy to dissect... I don't think it is, do you? I don't think you can say I've got the seven-year hoo-hoo-hoo and I can't get past that. I think it's so complicated, the whole of it."
Obligingly, he provides a mini guided tour of each marriage. "The first time I was very young and it was a disaster. The second time I didn't want to get married for ages because I lived with Marie-Lise for 16 years and she was killed in a riding accident." It was 1983 when he and his partner, the French model Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot, were out riding in Oxfordshire. His horse bolted, she went after it but lost her stirrup and landed on her head. Her death was hugely traumatic for Hurt. "That was a long, big, productive relationship with swings and roundabouts. It was upsy-downsies and sideways and this and that. Kicking against it, and loving it, and all sorts... All of that... That was brought to an end and I married on the rebound. It was a nonsensical thing to do. But as I say, you can only see things from retrospect. At the time it seemed to be correct."
Marriage number three, to Jo Dalton, provided him with his two sons (Sasha, 19, and Nick, 16). And four years ago he married film producer Anwen Rees-Myers. Has he got it right this time? "Yes, I seem to have done. Or maybe she did."
Does life seem more sober, in every sense, now he's stopped drinking? His eyes light up. "Nonononono, anything but," he says in a giddy blur. "I feel more electrified by life than I did ever. I don't miss any of that at all. You could say that's age, but I don't know that it is." What electrifies him most? "Conversation. The business of living. Work still excites me."
Would he have liked to have been a painter? "I'd rather have been an actor. I like entertaining. I adore it. I feel I'm in the right place. Without question." As far back as he can remember, he entertained. "I improvised, then I was put into school plays. I played girls cos it was a boys' school and I was quite pretty and had a very high voice. But it didn't worry me whether it was a girl, boy or beastie. It didn't make any difference to me. I had huge fun playing girls. I played Lady Bracknell when I was 16. Not many people get the chance of playing one of the great female parts as a man at 16. It was forrrrrrmidable to play."
Perhaps it's revisiting Quentin Crisp that has made him think so much of the past. Hurt kept in touch with Crisp until he died in 1999. Both were aware of the strangely symbiotic relationship – Hurt had made Crisp famous, Crisp had made Hurt famous. This time round there was an added poignancy: Hurt is almost the same age as the Crisp he plays at the start of An Englishman In New York. "You have to treat it more introvertedly, softer. He's older. It's a lot to do with age." It's not the older Crisp's glamour or celebrity that has remained with Hurt so much as his loneliness. "He refused, just refused, to let anyone be that close to him. It was an impossible situation for him. As he says, the great dark man syndrome – what you wish and what you long for is not a possibility." Crisp dreamed of love with the right man, but thought it an impossibility. If anything, returning to Crisp has made Hurt grateful for the way things have worked out for him in later years. He's never been quite so close to contentment.
It's funny that, despite all the women in his life, he is probably still best remembered for his portrayal of a gay man. "Oh yes," he says, "everybody thought I was gay anyway."
Was he ever tempted that way? "To be gay? I don't think you can be. You know what you fancy, don't you?" Has he ever dabbled? "Oooooooh," he says with an outlandishly stretched syllable. "How do you answer it? I think I went through what could be called a classic Greek cycle, from monosexuality to homosexuality to heterosexuality. The homosexual stage was at school. It was masturbatory, not penetratory, if that's a word." Did it go on into adult life? "No, it stopped dead, absolutely dead, when I left school. Extraordinary. The cycle of life is lemonade and boys, to beer and fast cars, to whisky and women, and finishing up with port and boys. So I don't know..." He stops to consider that final stage, and grins. "I think my wife might have something to say about that, don't you?"