John Hurt’s sexual ambiguity

last updated 8 January 2015

John Hurt denies that he’s gay—sort of, says Simon Hattenstone in the London Guardian. The 69-year-old British actor is well aware that many people have long assumed he is homosexual—a reputation helped by his penchant for playing gay roles, from a tittering, campy Caligula in I, Claudius to gay icon Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant. “Oh, yes,” he muses, “everybody thought I was gay.” That impression began at a young age, when his unusually pretty features won him female roles in plays at his boarding school in Kent. There, he says, he went through what he calls a “homosexual stage”—though, he hastens to add, “It was masturbatory, not penetratory, if that’s a word.” But any tendencies in that direction “stopped dead, absolutely dead, when I left school.” Since then he has been married four times, most recently to film producer Anwen Rees-Myers, whom he wed four years ago. Still, he’s not sure that his sexual identity is completely formed yet. “I think I went through what could be called a classic Greek cycle, from monosexuality to homosexuality to heterosexuality. The cycle

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