Davey Haggart, there's a fascinating character! Hung in 1821 at the age of twenty. He was a real person, and he had a neurosis. He was driven by the idea that he had to top a highwayman named Will Haggart he thought to be his father. He made his mother swear on the Bible that he was Haggart's son and conceived the idea of following in his steps; it wasn't just a matter of robbing a coach--it had to be a coach on the same run! He was so humiliated by having grown up in a workhouse that he resolved to redeem his name by doing the same deeds his father had done, but successfully. Davey wrote the story of his life while in prison waiting to be hung-he was executed in County Wicklow, lreland, where he had come from Scotland, which had become too hot for him at the time. In our movie, he's hung too, but a pal of his working for the executioner loosens the rope so he isn't killed. When he's taken away in a wooden box, he's able to get out and he goes off with Annie-that's Pamela Franklin-the girl he grew up with, who has been following him all through the movie preaching salvation and the "gude book." The joke is that he goes off from a hanging to a fate worse than death!
I think the director, John Huston, took on the picture because he's been trying to outdo his father, Walter Huston, and that's impossible. How do you cope with a genius? I couldn't communicate with my own father. While I was growing up I couldn't talk to either of my parents. With the best intentions of the world, they were hung up on their own problems, and I had mine. I didn't know who I was, what I could do, what I wanted; I wasn't so much rebellious as hostile, negative toward everything and everybody. Pretty terrible way to feel, really. Funny to think about it now, but I was a completely solitary, lonely person. That's the horror of being brought up with sham and convention in a way that doesn't allow you to face things as they really are and speak the truth. My father's a clergyman, Church of England. He's the son of a landscape gardener, brought up by a man who had studied Latin and Greek by himself. 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.
The first twelve years of my life were spent in a town in the industrial countryside of northern England, a village surrounded by coal mines. There were growing things in our garden-I remember we had strawberries and once when I was five, I went out and ate half the berries. I came back into the house with my face smeared with the red juice and called out, 'If anybody wants to know who ate ail the strawberries in the yard, it wasn't me!' I led a completely solitary life. I liked the village boys but my father didn't approve of any of my friends. He was hopelessly middle class but my mother was more so; she was the one who really concerned herself with the social proprieties.
I loathed school. I don't have an academic mind, and besides I was so bored by my teachers! How teachers can take a child's inventiveness and say yes, yes, in that pontifical way of theirs, and smother everything! I simply couldn't learn anything and failed many subjects. I don't really think that children can be led by parents or teachers. What you have to do is stimulate their minds, if you can, and help them understand that they should think for themselves and come to their own conclusions. That's what they want to do; it's only when they're prevented by adults that trouble comes up.
The only things in school I enjoyed were the dramatic productions, which I fell in with when I was nine; fortunately, both schools I went to had good dramatic departments. I never went to the movies until I was eight. The first film I ever saw was Treasure Island with Robert Newton. But it wasn't until I saw Alec Guinness play Fagin in Oliver Twist that I really became involved in acting. I thought he was absolutely marvellous, wonderful. I loved watching him, and it seemed like so much fun that I wanted to do the same sort of thing myself. In those days I found that I spoke like anyone I met. If I met a cockney, I'd find myself speaking with a Cockney accent. If I met someone from the North, I'd be echoing his speech pattern. I didn't do it consciously, I just couldn't help it, and I didn't mean to put anyone down by it, but it infuriated my father. He always thought I was playing a trick or a joke on people. I was keen on sports-that's how my nose got this way. It's not actually broken; the nose was just pushed up a little bit and moved over. It's an aquiline nose, quite Irish.
When I was twelve, we moved to Grimsby, the largest coastal fishing port in England, and I was sent off to boarding school. I hated that too, although in a way it was better than remaining at home. Then when I was seventeen, they put me in a local art school. Actually, they didn't know what to do with me. I wanted to act, but they refused it at the time, which made sense. Seventeen is much too young for someone to go into the theatre. You don't know enough to cope with it all, the people you meet, the conditions you find.
I spent two years at art school and showed some talent so they packed me off to London to another school for a couple of years and then I had my own studio, which I rented for thirty bob a week-that was then about four dollars and twenty cents. I painted mostly nudes, using friends for models. I never had to pay for professional models; that would have been quite ruinous. 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.
I had a basement studio, but with enough light, and every so often I'd sell a canvas, enough to keep going. I'd be at the local pub having a drink with someone-all I owned was a pair of corduroy trousers and a shirt which would be covered with paint so it wasn't hard to tell what I did-and occasionally some chap would say, "Let me come over and see what sort of work you turn out; maybe I'll be interested in buying a picture." I'd be able to flog one off for ten quid, then about twenty-eight dollars, and that would give me enough to continue living in dire poverty.
When I couldn't get another scholarship to art school, I decided to go into acting and began trying out for drama school, and after a year of auditioning around, I got into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I went to RADA for two years. There was no money from home. I lived on five pounds a week and that covered room, food, clothes, everything. While I was in school, I did a couple of TV programmes, series shows; I'd do one part and then get another, and gradually I built up a name for myself. I've been acting for five years now. My first film was a terrible affair called The Wild and the Willing. The biggest thing I had was a play called Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, which had rave notices and closed in two weeks; it had a very bad title and no promotion or publicity. The play was about an art student in the North of England who decides to form a political party with himself at the center and take over the town. Once it took shape, you could see a parallel with the Hitler story-how someone could appear in the unlikeliest place and if the conditions were right, bring it off. I'll never do a part like Little Malcolm again, too exhausting. I was onstage for three hours continuously; it's too much. But it did a great deal for me. It opened at a festival in Dublin before it came to London, and that's where Fred Zinnemann saw me and cast me as Rich in A Man for All Seasons, my second movie, which led to my getting this role as Davey. When Huston, who's a friend of Zinnemann, first approached me for Sinful Davey, he discussed every aspect of A Man for All Seasons, and finally he said, "And you, John, you did everything you were called upon to do." That to me was the greatest thing he could say. I hate people who are sycophants, praising you, who just blow things up and throw a lot of nonsense at you. Huston made a test of me and decided that I was right for the part, but then he ran into trouble with United Artists. I didn't have a star name, and they didn't think it was wise to invest in anyone like me. John fought it out, and even though I think for one day the picture was off altogether, he won. He made a bigger test of me to show them, and after seeing it, they agreed-and here we are in Ireland on location.
You've got to shout to make yourself heard in this business. It's unfortunate, but true-if you don't spell everything out in your contract, you've got only yourself to blame for the treatment you get. Otherwise, whether it's having a caravan-a dressing-room trailer-on the set each day, or whatever it is, you don't get it. You stand in line for twenty minutes for your food or else you go up to the head and say, "I'm John Hurt." Who wants to do it either way? You don't want to stand in line for lunch when you've got only your lunch hour to study lines that have just been rewritten, and it's impossible to buck the line when you're working with all these people; it's just too embarrassing. I hate to behave that way, but they force you to be a crumb. And what's more, they don't respect you for being nice and not raising your voice. It's only when you do that they say, "Oh well," and come around.
Painting taught me a lot. Being a painter is a lonely, desolate life, but I learned by observing people, observing conditions around me, the way things worked. And I've found that painting-which I still do-has helped me a great deal as an actor. There's a surprising amount in common. The way you work on a character is like sketching in oil, working with the pigment, roughing it out, smoothing it with a palette knife, going as far as you can, adding whatever invention you think of, until you don't know what to do anymore. Then you stop and begin a new picture. Acting is just like that. You work on a character until you don't know how to go any further, then you begin another.
I'm twenty-seven, the youngest of three. I've been separated from my wife for the past three years or so. In this sort of life, I can't bear to be tied down or involved with children; I've got a friend coming to visit me but if she so much as raises one finger to make me feel self-conscious about what I'm doing, she gets packed off back to London. My sister is a schoolteacher in Australia. She has been around quite a bit, had a hard time, never married. My brother, who is the eldest of the family, is a Roman Catholic monk. He was converted at Cambridge. He's a mod monk, poor man, the kind who sings the mass set to jazz and thinks he's getting the younger generation to come to church because of it. I see him every few months and we sit around and argue about things, but no matter what corner he's forced into, he ends up with some sort of weakly logical explanation that seemingly explains it all to his satisfaction. I don't believe in a God myself; if there is one, he has made far too many errors for me. When my brother joined the Catholic Church, it really shook my father up. He couldn't understand. What's the difference, actually, between believing in a God on one side or the other, Catholic or Protestant? It's all the same if you accept it. Much of our morality is based on things completely outmoded. But people are wonderful. There's no harm in them, they're not the problem. It's governments and politics that make wars and do stupid things, and they should be attended to. There's no security in this life. You look around and how many careers do you see with their debris littering the wayside? That's an actor's life, but if I had it to do all over again, I'd do the same thing.
