Hurt: Why I'm a Scotsman-reading festivals fanatic

Published on Friday 14 August 2009 22:04

DAYS before, William Hurt had been on the high-rolling set of Hollywood's latest take on Robin Hood, playing a powerful English earl in a $130 million (£79m) epic of swordplay, archery and horsemanship, starring Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett.

Now the star of films such as Kiss of the Spiderwoman and The Incredible Hulk is in the Underbelly bar, sharing beers with the cast of a little-known Fringe play he'd fallen in love with.

He talks about his passion for theatre, his search for his Scottish roots, and how he's finally got to Edinburgh's festivals after a 35-year wait.

The magic of the Edinburgh Festival has clearly taken hold of a man who has seen most of what Hollywood has to offer, but who began as a stage actor and who seeks out Shakespeare wherever he can find it. Clutching a fat, bound notebook filled with flyers and his thoughts on shows he's seen, he declares: "Oh my God. This is the best thing in the world. This is it, this is the top of the world, as far as I'm concerned."

Early in his career, Hurt, 59, trod the stage with New York's Circle Repertory Company. Well after the 1981 film Bodyheat, with Kathleen Turner, turned him into an 1980s screen star and sex symbol, he was still taking roles such as Richard II.

The New York company tried repeatedly to come to Edinburgh, he says, but never quite made it. "It was my desire to come here for 35 years," he says. "I was a member of that repertory ensemble for many years, 12 years, and I always wanted to come here with many productions. I was on my way as an individual, or in a production, and always got waylaid.

"I was here on the film in England with Ridley Scott and when I knew that the schedule was going to permit me to come up here, I just rented a car and drove up."

Hurt's trip is going beyond Edinburgh. This weekend, after a stormy golfing session at St Andrews, he leaves for a solo trip to the Highlands and Skye, planning to simply stop at B&Bs along the way, on "a short personal tour I have been planning for years".

Like a good few middle-aged Americans, Hurt is tracing his roots; he had checked into a city hotel discreetly, under a name from his family's Scottish heritage. "I think my blood comes from Skye, and I'm going to go and do a little research," he says.

He has already been to the Scottish Genealogy Society on Edinburgh's Victoria Terrace. "Of the main family names, Hurt disappears in the mist fast," he said. "McChord, the one I seek and have family hints leading to Skye, is yet to be sounded. The genealogy ladies on Victoria Terrace were perplexed but excited, but I have not finished the quest."

This year's crop of celebrity names at the Fringe ranges from the redoubtable Scottish film and stage actor Brian Cox, closely involved with The World venue, to TV comedian and raconteur Ronnie Corbett.

When major filmstars go public at the festival, it is often for a fleeting minute to give a helping shot of publicity to a show to which they are connected.

Hurt – an actor who found solace from the collapse of his first marriage by driving across the US to an Oregon Shakespeare festival – is simply sucking up the atmosphere.

Within eight minutes of arriving at his hotel, Hurt says, he was on his way to a show – the sultry singer Camille O'Sullivan at the Assembly Hall, recommended by a "friend of a friend". Later, he took in Ali McGregor, another alumni of the hit show La Clique, in her Late-Nite Variety-Nite Night cabaret show, where she plays the lap-sized auto-harp. "It knocked my socks off, it was the lady with the lap harp. She's incredible."

It was at Camille's show that actor Charlie Cattrall spotted Hurt and handed him a flyer for the Underbelly's show, Killing Alan. He enthuses about the play, about a banker and his brother forced to come to terms with life after the death of his parents, modelled on the Arthurian romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

His festival journey then ranged to West Lethargy, a "wonderful work" involving his son's girlfriend, Mikaela Feely-Lehmann, to Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.

One of the hair stylists on the Robin Hood film, when she heard he was going north, told him her brother worked for the Arkle Theatre Company that produced it.

He watched it in rehearsal, giving his feedback to the cast. In a packed couple of days, Cardenio, the so-called lost Shakespeare play, by the Alternative Cambridge Company, was another stop.

At the Taming of the Shrew, Hurt met freelance photographer Chris Close. That led to a joint trip to St Andrews for the actor, a keen golfer. "A corker of a storm hit us," he texted later. "The fairways were awash, the winds howling, the hail nipped."

Hurt's starring film roles have been less high-profile lately, since the 1980s heyday of Children of a Lesser God or Broadcast News. But after major television productions such as Lost in Space in 1998, he returned to features with Steven Spielberg's AI in 2000. In Robin Hood, he appears as the Earl of Pembroke, a powerful servant of the king.

In Edinburgh, however, he dispenses with the trappings of celebrity. "I had a contact that was going to do all that for me, but I said no, I will do that myself. I'm reading The Scotsman, and I'm walking the streets, walking the Mile, taking flyers, I'm listening to people talk, I'm asking strangers what I should see."

Edinburgh, used to 60 years of festival history, has been suffering fits of insecurity even before last year's ticketing crisis.

"The more you worry about that, the more you will let the crows in," Hurt says. "Let it be what it is. It's Scotland, it's this culture that allows this thing to take place. It's not the retailers. It's not capitalism."