John
Hurt is Alan Clark
 John
Hurt, 63, plays the flamboyant figure in Ö÷²¥´óÐã FOUR's The Alan Clark
Diaries, focusing on the merry, and sometimes malicious, musings
which Clark penned from 1983 until his death.
Hurt,
whose numerous definitive roles have included Quentin Crisp in The
Naked Civil Servant and John Merrick in The Elephant Man, says:
"My reason for doing The Alan Clark Diaries is that I've
always enjoyed playing individuals and you can't get more
individual than Alan Clark."
Award-winning
actor John Hurt cloaks himself in the mantle of Alan Clark, the
outrageous Tory Minister who scandalised – but enthralled
– the nation.
Clark's
leviathan personality was irresistible to Hurt.
"Clark
was larger than life and that was exactly the appeal of the role,"
says John, in that unforgettable voice hewn in a timber yard.
"He's
a fascinating character and, in my game, that's what you're looking
for all the time. And he has a very fascinating background. The
whole political thing is interesting and the diaries are demonstrative,
forthright and unusual. You couldn't help but be interested."
Clark,
MP for Plymouth for 18 years, and the Member for Kensington and
Chelsea at the time of his death, was criticised for his role in
the arms-for-Iraq affair and famously admitted, during the 1992
Matrix Churchill trial, that he had been "economical with
the actualité".
"I
didn't know too much about the big gun for Saddam,"
says John, "although I remember all that happening. There's
one faction that would say Clark was a good politician; there's
another faction that would say that if it wasn't for Maggie,
he would never have been tolerated at all – that he was a
favourite. It's all supposition, really."
On
the accuracy of the diaries, John comments drily: "Memory
plays funny tricks, so any of those accounts are bound to have certain
biases and memorial qualities about them."
The
three-times wed father of two sons - who received the Richard Harris
Award for Outstanding Contribution by an Actor at the recent British
Independent Film Awards - is full of admiration for Clark's widow,
Jane (played by Jenny Agutter), who allowed Ö÷²¥´óÐã FOUR cameras into
Saltwood Castle in Kent.
"She's
terrific," says John. "She was there all the time we were
shooting and she's a fantastic woman.
"I
found it very difficult to think of her as separate from Jenny,"
he confesses with a smile. "Both have similar, military backgrounds
and both are very effervescent people.
"Jane
really had a good time and didn't want to see us go in the end.
I really liked her a lot and I hope she likes the piece."
Alan
Clark's extra-marital shenanigans were legendary but, "Jane
just adored him," asserts John, the Derbyshire-born son of
a clergyman.
"She
had awful times, but people do. They didn't pretend there weren't
awful times to be had. They didn't suffer from the American disease
that everything has to be just splendid all the time, because it
isn't, and they both seemed to be able to cope with it."
He
continues: "Jane was less conventional than people think. She
was perfectly capable of saying, 'the French have had mistresses
throughout history, what's so strange?' It's like Alan would say:
'Why are you treating it as peculiar? I'm not killing anyone, am
I?' And it takes two to tango."
John,
who has homes in London and Ireland, didn't wade through a
sea of facts before taking the plunge to play the pro-hanging, vegetarian,
animal-loving Clark.
"I've
never done much research," he declares frankly.
"I
rely much more on imagination. And even if I'm doing something which
is based on fact, or even a person's factual existence, albeit deceased,
I still treat the script in exactly the same way as if it were fiction.
It has to come from the script, because if it isn't in the script,
it doesn't exist."
He
stresses: "You can finish up with a lot of peripheral stuff
that is of no real value and just rather confusing, and also likely
to be as much conjecture as anything else.
"What
makes a thing get up and run is imagination – it isn't research.
You can research until you're blue in the face but even then you
don't know that you're right and it doesn't help you to get up and
act it."
John
adds: "All the research is done by the writers, basically,
and one knows enough about Alan Clark. It's absolutely fascinating
but it doesn't help," he says candidly, "because I can't
be him. I have to deal with it in a different dramatic way.
"Hopefully,
it encapsulates the essence of him, but I'm not trying to sound
like him and I'm not trying to look like him.
"I'm
not doing an impersonation and it isn't a biography –
it's a diary, which is quite different. They are statements
that he has made and whatever is acted out, is acted out from those
statements."
So
why did Clark record his outrageous observations – he sometimes
called them "Jane's pension fund" - for posterity?
"That
fascinates me, because he clearly intended them to be both heard
and read," muses John, who made his professional acting debut
in 1962.
"He
was determined to write them in such a way that he could claim they
were completely real and totally honest. Possibly he was a genuine
diarist, in the same way that Pepys was.
"And
he certainly was a historian and a very good writer. So probably
it was the historian in him that wanted it to be as accurate a report
as possible of what politics was about at this particular period
of time – he was capturing an era.
"There
are a thousand different reasons why he should have done that, I
suppose, but I don't think there's anything you could claim was
definitive."
John's
famous, folded features break into a smile when it's suggested
that he has a certain abrasive quality that he can bring to the
role of Clark.
"The
thing about Alan was that he could be abrasive, but he could be
enormously sensitive on the same subject. He was full of contradictions
and inconsistencies, which is probably why it was very difficult
to consider him as Cabinet member because he was a real loose cannon.
"He
might have made a Prime Minister. He was extremely erudite and he
had a very good mind. He had good presentation and presence. He
had a bravery and he also had a cowardice. That's what makes him
interesting. He was a mass of opposites.
"One
minute he would be, without question, the only person suitable for
Prime Minister; another minute, he would be looking up to Tom King
(then Defence Secretary) or The Lady (Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher)
in a way that was almost schoolboy-like."
John
adds philosophically: "As dear Oscar said, the truth is never
pure and rarely simple."
Clark
– together with a number of his Parliamentary colleagues –
fell under the spell of Prime Minister Thatcher's charms.
"A
lot of them did," agrees John. "That's the sort of thing
that's interesting because I always thought of her as being something
that made me ashamed to be English.
"But
I was always impressed with her in Parliament when she was talking,
say, to Neil Kinnock. She was brilliant, very quick and very funny.
That was her at her best and that's what they saw all the time.
"They
saw the political animal in her lair and she was shit-hot. I think
their admiration came from that, rather than something that we saw,
which was quite different.
"Poor
old Kinnock," says John sympathetically. "I don't know
how he remained head of the party for so long because he just got
squashed – she pinned him down every single time."
John
has no political ambitions himself: "I don't think I'd be very
good," he admits.
The
actor, whose many famous roles include Quentin Crisp in The Naked
Civil Servant and John Merrick in The Elephant Man, has also starred
as the imperious Caligula in Ö÷²¥´óÐã TV's I, Claudius, in Midnight Express
and Scandal and, more recently, in Captain Corelli's Mandolin and
Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone.
He
denies he has an ideal role: "I don't have ambitions in that
sense; the problem with having ambitions is that you might achieve
them, and then what would you do," he says with a throaty laugh.
"I
don't know what the future holds – I just hope it's exciting.
"In
terms of what I have done, I don't have any favourite. I enjoyed
Quentin enormously, but it also made a difference in terms of the
public and business perceptions of me as a performer, so that was
probably the most important.
"But
I liked lots of the characters, for example, Winston Smith from
Nineteen Eighty Four, from knowing him since I was 16."
If
he hadn't been an actor, John would probably have continued
with his studies at St Martin's School of Art in London, where
he was in the frame as a painter before winning a scholarship to
RADA.
"But
had I got the academic qualifications, which I never would have
got because I couldn't pass maths, I would quite have enjoyed
going into diplomacy – but only if I could have been an ambassador!
"My
father was a bit upset because he was a double first in mathematics
and engineering," he reveals. "But I think I was badly
taught because I couldn't hear the teacher. And you got fed up with
asking, 'Please, sir, could you say that again?'
"I
think people who were like myself – who didn't have an aptitude
for maths – went under; and the people who did have an aptitude,
it didn't really make much difference, because they would have worked
it out anyhow."
However
the figures add up, though, this consummate actor is a huge plus
for stage and screen.
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