A better class of hellraiser: John Hurt's drinking was legendary. But MICHAEL THORNTON, who knew him, says he was insecure, modest - and didn't have a macho bone in his body

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The first time I met Sir John Hurt was at Shepperton Studios during the making of the 1966 Oscar-winning classic A Man For All Seasons. He was playing the scheming courtier Richard Rich, a role which did much to cement his reputation as a highly accomplished performer.

Hurt was then just 26, and booze had not yet claimed him, but the signs of what was to come were already there.

He was about to film a scene with Paul Scofield, a great and consummate actor. Hurt was tense and wound up like a clock spring. During our conversation, he took constant nips from a silver hip flask.

'This business is bloody nerve-making,' he said. That did not stop him, of course from producing over the course of his career some of the most memorable screen roles of the age. For John Hurt was a man who believed in living at full throttle, and he faced death as he faced life — with optimism and courage of the most sublime order.

John Hurt was a man who believed in living at full throttle, and he faced death as he faced life - with optimism and courage of the most sublime order, says Michael Thornton

There was also an infinite poignancy to the last difficult months of the life of John Hurt, who has died at 77 after a valiant battle against pancreatic cancer. In one of his final screen roles in That Good Night, yet to be released, he bravely mirrored his own circumstances by portraying a man in his 70s who is terminally ill.

He must have realised he was filming his own obituary. For although he had vowed 18 months ago, when he revealed his illness, to carry on working while undergoing treatment, he knew perfectly well, as he confessed to me at the time, that his chances of survival were slim.

'However little time now remains,' he told me, 'I shall go on working until they carry me out. It's the only life I've ever known.'

He appeared tired, frail and emaciated, but the wry black humour for which he was noted throughout his 55-year career came to the fore when he described one of his latest projects — a Radio 4 recording of Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, Keith Waterhouse's play about an alcoholic writer — as 'one of life's small ironies'.

It was indeed, for Hurt himself had been a chronic alcoholic for years, and his frequently wild and disordered existence had been crammed full of ironies.

He made his name playing flawed, inadequate and sometimes sexually confused men, and often the character that emerged on screen seemed to have borrowed heavily from the ordeals and afflictions of his astonishing private life.

He BECAME a star on television playing the outrageously flamboyant homosexual Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant, in 1975, only one of a number of gay roles he performed on screen.

Others included mad Roman Emperor Caligula in I, Claudius, in 1976; Fred, the gay cop in Partners, opposite Ryan O'Neal in 1982; the middle-aged writer who falls in love with a young movie star (Jason Priestley) in Love And Death On Long Island, in 1997; and a reprise of Quentin Crisp in An Englishman In New York, in 2009.

Four times married, and thrice divorced, he was asked if these extraordinarily convincing performances arose from any sexual confusion in his own life. 'I think I went through what could be called a classic Greek cycle, from monosexuality to homosexuality to heterosexuality,' he said.

'The homosexual stage was at school. It was masturbatory, not penetratory, if that's a word . . . 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 . . .'

Hurt, pictured in 2012 with his fourth wife, Anwen (left), and reprising the role of Quentin Crisp in 2009 (right) died on Saturday after a long battle with pancreatic cancer

To put it mildly, Hurt's life was strange from the start.

He was born on January 22, 1940, in Shirebrook, a coalmining village near Chesterfield in Derbyshire, the youngest of the three children of Phyllis Massey, a one-time actress, and Arnould Hurt, an Anglican vicar and mathematician, with whom his relationship was distant in the extreme.

As a child he became entranced by watching Alec Guinness's screen performance as Fagin in the film of Oliver Twist. At St Michael's Preparatory School in Otford, Kent, he had his first acting role — as a girl in the school production of The Bluebird.

At St Michael's, he was sexually abused by the senior master, the late Donald Cormack, who would remove his two false front teeth before forcing his tongue into Hurt's mouth, then rub his face with his stubble. Hurt said this experience affected him 'hugely'.

At his secondary school in Lincoln, the headmaster laughed in his face when Hurt told him he wanted to be an actor and said he 'wouldn't stand a chance'.

But he eventually won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and had his first screen role in 1962 in The Wild And The Willing, as a student who doesn't play rugger and can't sink a full pint of beer. It set the style for the whole of his early career, as one of the least macho actors to have risen to any form of stardom in Britain.

In the same year, he married for the first time, at 22, the actress Annette Robertson, who allegedly told him she was pregnant. Hurt waited but no child arrived, and after 18 months they parted. They were divorced in 1964.

Hurt starred in more than 200 films and television series over six decades. He's pictured above in the film 1984

His first truly notable film was Fred Zinnemann's A Man For All Seasons, in which Hurt played the scheming, dishonest Rich, who, in return for political advancement, gives false evidence of treason against Henry VIII's chancellor, Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield).

His greatest early performance came in 1971 in 10 Rillington Place, as the hapless, neurotic, unstable and mentally retarded Timothy Evans, who is hanged for a murder that was really committed by the necrophile John Christie.

Hurt empathised profoundly with Evans. 'We are all victims, in one way or another,' he told me at that time, 'and eventually we pay for it with our lives.'

Four years later, against all advice, Hurt accepted the role of Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant, which elevated him to stardom.

'Everyone told me not to do it,' he said. 'They said: 'It will wreck your career. You will be typecast as a homosexual.' ' But Crisp himself, who became a celebrity as a result, was delighted with the portrayal and took to describing Hurt as 'my representative here on earth'.

International starring roles followed, including the heroin addict Max in Midnight Express, for which he won his first Oscar nomination in 1979, the sci-fi horror, Alien, in which he died when an invading creature burst from his chest like a phallic monstrosity, and The Elephant Man, as the stuttering and hideously deformed John Merrick.

It was this performance — described by Sir John Gielgud as 'infinitely touching . . . almost endearing' — which won him a BAFTA and his second Oscar nomination in 1980.

From 1968 onwards, he was involved in a 15-year relationship with a French model, Marie-Lise Volpeliere Pierrot, which ended tragically in 1983, when he witnessed her death in a horrifying ridingaccident in Oxfordshire after her horse bolted.

They had been on the point of getting married and her loss devastated him. He never entirely recovered from it.

Hurt played the role of Mr Ollivander in the 2001 film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

It has been suggested it was this that drove him into excessive drinking, but his addiction began years earlier. His mood swings, which he called his 'ups and downs', had long since developed into chronic alcoholism, which threatened his life and career for years to come.

At MURIEL'S, the London club run by the legendary Muriel Belcher, he spent his days alongside a circle of wild-living hard drinkers that included the painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, and the actors Peter O'Toole, Richard Harris and Oliver Reed.

'I wasn't like Oliver Reed,' he would insist. 'He was a competitive drinker. He'd say: 'I can drink you under the f*****g table.' And I'd say: 'I'm sure you could, Oliver, but where's the fun in that?' '

But the drinking began to show more and more. Hurt was ejected from a lap-dancing club, Spearmint Rhino, for 'boorish behaviour', and a painter friend who invited him back to his flat came into the room to find that Hurt had stripped off because he wanted to be painted in the nude.

After making the film 1984, with Richard Burton, they went on an extended bar crawl in Celigny, Switzerland, after which Burton developed an intracerebral haemorrhage and died at the age of 59.

In 1984, Hurt married a Texan barmaid, Donna Peacock, whom he took to Kenya, where he was filming White Mischief. He and Donna built a house outside Nairobi, but when Hurt returned to Britain in 1988, he fell in love with a young production assistant, Jo Dalton, and he and Donna were divorced.

Hurt married Jo in 1990. The union produced two sons, Alexander (known as Sasha), now 26, and Nicholas, now 23, and lasted for six years, before Jo abandoned Hurt for their gardener.

He reacted to this ultimate rejection as if it were inevitable. 'Being famous and successful is not a substitute for being desirable,' he told me with an air of resignation. 'And I have never been desirable.'

In the 1989 film, Scandal, in which Hurt played the society osteopath Stephen Ward, his scenes called for him to undress, which he did. The same scenes also called for Joanne Whalley, as Christine Keeler, to strip off completely beside the swimming pool on the Cliveden estate.

This she refused to do, and a double had to be used. Not for the first time, Hurt openly showed his irritation. Leslie Phillips, who played Lord Astor in the film, admits: 'John was angry about this.'

Like many alcoholics, particularly in the acting profession, Hurt could fake sobriety. I met him again during the filming of Scandal and he was visibly the worse for drink, even swaying as he walked towards the set. Yet when I saw the film in the cinema, he appeared stone cold sober, with no hint of inebriation.

For years Hurt refused to have a mirror in the house, possibly because he preferred not to look at the ravages caused by alcohol. But after being awarded the CBE in 2004, he finally quit booze in 2005, just ahead of his fourth marriage to former actress and classical pianist Anwen Rees-Myers, 25 years his junior.

At long last dry, Hurt remained blisteringly outspoken, describing TV series Downton Abbey as 'poxy', with 'rotten writing and rotten acting'. He did not hide his obvious contempt for its creator, Julian Fellowes.

His career continued at a high level, appearing as the wand merchant, Mr Ollivander, in three of the Harry Potter films, and in 2013 as the War Doctor in the 50th anniversary edition of Dr Who. He was knighted in the 2015 New Year Honours list.

In spite of his increasing frailty, and the exhaustion caused by his illness, he battled gamely on with starring roles in Jackie, which received fine reviews when it was released this month, in the thriller Damascus Cover, the biopic of boxer Lenny McLean, My Name Is Lenny, and Darkest Hour, in which he plays Neville Chamberlain, scheduled for release in December.

But after more than 120 films, it was his very final role as a dying man in That Good Night which was the most remarkable of all. The title comes from the lines of a Dylan Thomas poem: 'Do not go gentle into that good night . . . Rage, rage against the dying of the light.'

John Hurt did not rage about his impending death. He accepted it calmly, just as he had always lived his life with an extraordinary kind of fatalism.

'We are all racing towards death,' he said once. 'What can you do, except do what you can as best you know how.'

Sir John Hurt's best was always superlative, even though it was fermented by personal torment. Now, thankfully, his unforgettably vivid performances will live on in the all-time canon of cinematic greatness.