John Hurt

Born: 22nd January 1940
Where: Derbyshire, England

The former painter's most memorable screen moments tend to be unsavoury ones - the Alien bursting out of his chest in the sci-fi thriller and The Elephant Man.

He was nominated for a best actor Academy Award for the latter and for the 1978 Turkish prison drama Midnight Express.

A graduate of London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he made both his stage debut in Infanticide in the House of Fred Ginger and his feature debut in The Young and the Willing.

It was his work in a London production of Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuch which convinced director Fred Zinnemann to cast him in the Academy Award-winning film version of A Man for All Seasons.

The film won six Oscars and bought the young actor his widest exposure to that time.

He delivered great performances in the TV biopic of Quentin Crisp The Naked Civil Servant and the series I, Claudius as well as the movie Midnight Express, for which he garnered a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.

After his performance in Ridley Scott's Alien, Hurt endured a long makeup routine to portray the grotesquely deformed John Merrick in David Lynch's The Elephant Man, earning another Oscar nomination.

He also starred as the downtrodden enemy of the state Winston Smith in the big screen version of George Orwell's 1984.

Although he appeared in plenty of mainstream pictures throughout the 90s Hurt was always willing to work with independents and first-time directors.

Two first-time directors who cast him were Michael Caton-Jones in Scandal, and Richard Kwietniowski in Love and Death on Long Island.

Hurt has also made a handsome living providing narration or character voices for a wide variety of TV and film projects.

He starred with Helen Mirren in an award-winning West End production of Turgenev's A Month in the Country and returned to film to play Penelope Cruz's dad in Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

John appeared as the wand seller Mr Ollivander in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and the narrator in Lars Von Trier's Dogville.

Recent work includes Hellboy, Guillermo Del Toro's confident superhero yarn.