This is a shame, since these older actors accomplished so much in their professions, performed so many roles in so many plays and films. But I suppose it's a good thing that it is thanks to Harry Potter that a great many more people felt a sense of loss at the deaths of these actors than there would otherwise have been, people who wouldn't otherwise have known who they were or everything they accomplished.
And this sad phenomenon is certainly not restricted to actors. How many people know Louis Armstrong for the song "What a Wonderful World" that he recorded in 1967, while remaining utterly ignorant of his towering accomplishments as a jazz trumpeter? Last April, the death of film director Jonathan Demme inspired numerous tributes, all of which mentioned two films for which he is best remembered, The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, while neglecting to mention the two films he made near the beginning of his career - Citizen's Band and Melvin and Howard - that were far superior.
I remember a particularly fascinating panel discussion about adapting novels to film I watched in the early 1980s with Avery Corman, John Gregory Dunne and E. L. Doctorow. Corman was the author of the novels Jacob's Ladder, Ghost and Kramer vs. Kramer. Dunne had written True Confessions. And Doctorow was the author of Ragtime. When Corman claimed that a successful film adaptation could increase the shelf-life of a book, Doctorow told him, "I don't think you should admit that, Avery!" How many great writers are doomed to be remembered for writing the "underlying story" of a popular movie? How many millions more people have seen the movie version of A Clockwork Orange, clever as it is, than will ever read the brilliant novel by Anthony Burgess?
When the death of John Hurt was announced last January (and the words "Harry Potter actor" appeared in every one of his obituaries) some of the tributes to him made it quite obvious that, while making worthwhile appearances in dozens of films for more than fifty years, many of which I have seen over the decades, a sizable portion of his fame as an actor rests on his stage performances, not one of which I had an opportunity to see. Most of the notices of Hurt's death mentioned that he was a theater actor, but that he is "best remembered" for his many movie roles. His obituary at the Guardian, written by a contemporary (Michael Coveney) who followed his career with great enthusiasm, gave a balanced assessment of him and his impact as an actor, emphasizing the importance of his theatrical performances, since the roles were, from a purely cultural perspective, immeasurably more significant than the mostly moribund films in which he appeared.
I remember a college professor in the '70s resurrecting the famous debate between theater critics Max Beerbohm and George Bernard Shaw over the comparable talents Eleanora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt. Ancient film footage of both actresses exists that offer tantalizing glimpses of exactly what Beerbohm and Shaw were arguing about, without providing convincing proof that Duse's subtleties outshone Bernhardt's grand gestures (or vice versa). The debate lives on as a purely literary dispute between brilliant theater critics.
But a theater critic's review is as close as most of us can get to theatrical performances in Paris, London, or New York. That is the nature of theater. Even if a stage performance is later recorded for film or television, seeing the recording of the event isn't at all the same as having been there, in the same space, breathing the same air the actors breathe.
Among John Hurt's theater triumphs, according to Michael Coveney in The Guardian, were in David Halliwell’s Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, and Pinter’s The Caretaker. He himself claimed to have made more than 150 films, choosing to play “the unloved … people like us, the inside-out people, who live their lives as an experiment, not as a formula.”
The number and variety of roles played in films by John Hurt is more than enough to attest to his greatness. Unfortunately, many other great stage actors never managed to find film roles to equal their best performances on the stage. The most obvious example is John Gielgud, unarguably the finest Shakespearean actor of his generation. While he was famous enough to the public to have enjoyed plenty of parts in films as long ago as the 1930s, he was certainly no matinee idol. But he was also not nearly as brilliant on screen - with notable exceptions through the years - as he is reported to have been on the stage. One longs for a time machine that would take one back to the Old Vic in the 1930s to witness any one of a number of productions of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Twelfth Night in which Gielgud - not to mention other great actors of his generation like Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave, and Peggy Ashcroft - performed. Gielgud died at the age of 96 in 2000, having missed the Harry Potter sweepstakes by just one year. Who knows but that, had he lived long enough to make only one film in the Potter franchise, even he would've been eulogized as a "Harry Potter actor."
(1) I write this mindful of the fact that it was Star Wars that suckered Alec Guinness into playing Obi Wan Kenobe. Poor Alec, stalwart veteran of stage and screen, is remembered by millions today for that role alone. The Star Wars people have lately persuaded Max von Sydow (with a handsome check) to play in one of their latest numbers. Who knows but that the man who gave us so many unforgettable performances in Swedish films by Bergman and Troell will be stigmatized with the moniker "Star Wars actor."
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