John Vincent Hurt CBE (born January 22, 1940) is an Academy Award-nominated English actor. He is one of Britain's best-known, most prolific and sought after character actors, and has had a versatile career spanning over 40 years. He is highly respected for his many Shakespearean roles.

Hurt was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire to Phyllis (her former surname was Massey), an amateur actress, and Arnould Herbert Hurt, a mathematician who became a clergyman. He had an older brother (Michael) and adopted sister (Monica). His father had been a vicar at St John in Sunderland, moving to Derbyshire in 1937, becoming the Perpetual Curate of Holy Trinity church. When he was five, his father became the vicar of St Stephen at Woodville in South Derbyshire, remaining there until 1953. He was not allowed to mix with local children as they were 'too common' and was sent to the anglo catholic St Michaels prep school at Sevenoaks in Kent when he was eight. He lived opposite a cinema, but was not allowed to attend it. At the age of nine, he decided to become an actor. His first ever role was in a school play, playing a girl in The Bluebird (L'Oiseau Bleu) by the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck. His father moved to St Aidan church in New Cleethorpes, where John was sent to board at Christ's Hospital School (then a grammar school) in Lincoln, as he had failed the entrance exam to get into his older brother's school. He would often go with his mother on Tuesday nights to Cleethorpes Rep theatre. His parents did not like the idea of him wanting to be an actor and encouraged him to be an art teacher instead. His headmaster, Mr Franklin laughed when he told him he wanted to be an actor saying 'you wouldn't stand a chance in the profession'. At the age of 17, he went to Grimsby Art School (now the East Coast School of Art & Design), where he studied art. In 1959, he won a scholarship to study for an Art Teachers Diploma (ATD) at Central St Martins College in Holborn, London. It was financially difficult for him, and he had to support himself by persuading some of his friends to pose nude for him, and selling the portraits. In 1960, he won a scholarship to RADA, where he trained for two years and found small roles on TV and began to watch many films being shown at Camden Polytechnic. In 1962, his father left his parish in Cleethorpes to become headmaster of St Michaels College in Belize, South America. His sister went to teach in Australia, and his brother (who went to the University of Cambridge) became a catholic monk. He first perfomed on the London stage in this year and also married the actress Annette Robertson, because she had claimed to be pregnant. The marriage ended in 1964 after eighteen months when the pregnancy never found. He performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was also for many years an alcoholic, yet has since rid himself of his addiction.[citation needed]. His longest relationship was with the French model Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot which was for fifteen years from 1967, which was ended by her untimely death in a riding accident on January 26th 1983. He was married for six years from September 6th 1984 to the Texan actress Donna Peacock (who he met in a California bar), who was a friend of his. He had proposed to her the day before at Freddie Mercury's 38th birthday party in the Xenon nightclub in London and they married at a local register office. They moved to Kenya and tried to have children through IVF. Soon after they divorced in early January 1990, he married the American film production assistant Jo Dalton on January 24th 1990, with whom he had two sons - Nicolas (born February 1990) and Alexander (born 1992). He had met her when filming on Scandal. This marriage ended in 1996 because she had an affair with a gardener, Arthur Shackleton, when he briefly went back to Donna Peacock in Kenya. His drinking had also been a problem. His father died at the age of 95 in November 1999, and his mother had died in 1975. Another recent partner was Sarah Owen, who was twenty years younger than him and with whom he lived with in County Wicklow, Ireland. He often liked drinking Guinness. In March 2005, he married the advertising film producer Ann Rees Meyers.

In January 2002, he received an honorary degree from the University of Derby, and in January 2006, he received an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Hull.

Hurt's first film was 1962's The Wild and the Willing, but his first major role was as Richard Rich in 1966's A Man for All Seasons. However, it was his portrayal of the outrageous Quentin Crisp in the 1975 TV play, The Naked Civil Servant, that shot him to fame, earning the British Academy Television Award for Best Actor in the process. The following year, Hurt portrayed the infamous Roman emperor Caligula in the major BBC drama serial, I, Claudius. In 1978 John appeared in Midnight Express, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He subsequently developed a successful film career, with his best known roles including Kane, the memorable first victim of the title creature in the film Alien (a role which he reprised as a parody in Spaceballs), would-be art school radical Scrawdyke in Little Malcolm and as "John" Merrick in the Joseph Merrick biography The Elephant Man, for which he won a Bafta and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor.. He also had a starring role in Sam Peckinpah's critically panned but hugely successful final film, The Osterman Weekend (1983).

Throughout his career, Hurt has also played roles in famous political allegory stories that sharply contrast themselves, with him first playing the hero in an early production and then the tyrannical villain in a later work. For instance, he has played Winston Smith in the 1984 adaptation of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and assumed the role of a Big Brother-esque leader of a fascist Great Britain in the 2006 film V for Vendetta, a movie which draws many parallels to the world of Orwell's 1984. In a similar parallel, Hurt played Hazel, the heroic rabbit leader of his warren in the film adaptation of Watership Down and later played the major villain, General Woundwort, in the animated television series.

In 1986, Hurt provided the voiceover for AIDS: Iceberg / Tombstone, a public-information film warning of the dangers of AIDS.

He was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in June 2004.

In June 2007, he was cast in Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones 4.

Hurt has married four times.