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John Hurt is Alan Clark

John Hurt, 63, plays the flamboyant figure in 91Èȱ¬ FOUR's The Alan Clark Diaries, focusing on the merry, and sometimes malicious, musings which Clark penned from 1983 until his death.

Hurt, whose numerous definitive roles have included Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant and John Merrick in The Elephant Man, says: "My reason for doing The Alan Clark Diaries is that I've always enjoyed playing individuals and you can't get more individual than Alan Clark."

Award-winning actor John Hurt cloaks himself in the mantle of Alan Clark, the outrageous Tory Minister who scandalised – but enthralled – the nation.

Clark's leviathan personality was irresistible to Hurt.

"Clark was larger than life and that was exactly the appeal of the role," says John, in that unforgettable voice hewn in a timber yard.

"He's a fascinating character and, in my game, that's what you're looking for all the time. And he has a very fascinating background. The whole political thing is interesting and the diaries are demonstrative, forthright and unusual. You couldn't help but be interested."

Clark, MP for Plymouth for 18 years, and the Member for Kensington and Chelsea at the time of his death, was criticised for his role in the arms-for-Iraq affair and famously admitted, during the 1992 Matrix Churchill trial, that he had been "economical with the actualité".

"I didn't know too much about the big gun for Saddam," says John, "although I remember all that happening. There's one faction that would say Clark was a good politician; there's another faction that would say that if it wasn't for Maggie, he would never have been tolerated at all – that he was a favourite. It's all supposition, really."

On the accuracy of the diaries, John comments drily: "Memory plays funny tricks, so any of those accounts are bound to have certain biases and memorial qualities about them."

The three-times wed father of two sons - who received the Richard Harris Award for Outstanding Contribution by an Actor at the recent British Independent Film Awards - is full of admiration for Clark's widow, Jane (played by Jenny Agutter), who allowed 91Èȱ¬ FOUR cameras into Saltwood Castle in Kent.

"She's terrific," says John. "She was there all the time we were shooting and she's a fantastic woman.

"I found it very difficult to think of her as separate from Jenny," he confesses with a smile. "Both have similar, military backgrounds and both are very effervescent people.

"Jane really had a good time and didn't want to see us go in the end. I really liked her a lot and I hope she likes the piece."

Alan Clark's extra-marital shenanigans were legendary but, "Jane just adored him," asserts John, the Derbyshire-born son of a clergyman.

"She had awful times, but people do. They didn't pretend there weren't awful times to be had. They didn't suffer from the American disease that everything has to be just splendid all the time, because it isn't, and they both seemed to be able to cope with it."

He continues: "Jane was less conventional than people think. She was perfectly capable of saying, 'the French have had mistresses throughout history, what's so strange?' It's like Alan would say: 'Why are you treating it as peculiar? I'm not killing anyone, am I?' And it takes two to tango."

John, who has homes in London and Ireland, didn't wade through a sea of facts before taking the plunge to play the pro-hanging, vegetarian, animal-loving Clark.

"I've never done much research," he declares frankly.

"I rely much more on imagination. And even if I'm doing something which is based on fact, or even a person's factual existence, albeit deceased, I still treat the script in exactly the same way as if it were fiction. It has to come from the script, because if it isn't in the script, it doesn't exist."

He stresses: "You can finish up with a lot of peripheral stuff that is of no real value and just rather confusing, and also likely to be as much conjecture as anything else.

"What makes a thing get up and run is imagination – it isn't research. You can research until you're blue in the face but even then you don't know that you're right and it doesn't help you to get up and act it."

John adds: "All the research is done by the writers, basically, and one knows enough about Alan Clark. It's absolutely fascinating but it doesn't help," he says candidly, "because I can't be him. I have to deal with it in a different dramatic way.

"Hopefully, it encapsulates the essence of him, but I'm not trying to sound like him and I'm not trying to look like him.

"I'm not doing an impersonation and it isn't a biography – it's a diary, which is quite different. They are statements that he has made and whatever is acted out, is acted out from those statements."

So why did Clark record his outrageous observations – he sometimes called them "Jane's pension fund" - for posterity?

"That fascinates me, because he clearly intended them to be both heard and read," muses John, who made his professional acting debut in 1962.

"He was determined to write them in such a way that he could claim they were completely real and totally honest. Possibly he was a genuine diarist, in the same way that Pepys was.

"And he certainly was a historian and a very good writer. So probably it was the historian in him that wanted it to be as accurate a report as possible of what politics was about at this particular period of time – he was capturing an era.

"There are a thousand different reasons why he should have done that, I suppose, but I don't think there's anything you could claim was definitive."

John's famous, folded features break into a smile when it's suggested that he has a certain abrasive quality that he can bring to the role of Clark.

"The thing about Alan was that he could be abrasive, but he could be enormously sensitive on the same subject. He was full of contradictions and inconsistencies, which is probably why it was very difficult to consider him as Cabinet member because he was a real loose cannon.

"He might have made a Prime Minister. He was extremely erudite and he had a very good mind. He had good presentation and presence. He had a bravery and he also had a cowardice. That's what makes him interesting. He was a mass of opposites.

"One minute he would be, without question, the only person suitable for Prime Minister; another minute, he would be looking up to Tom King (then Defence Secretary) or The Lady (Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher) in a way that was almost schoolboy-like."

John adds philosophically: "As dear Oscar said, the truth is never pure and rarely simple."

Clark – together with a number of his Parliamentary colleagues – fell under the spell of Prime Minister Thatcher's charms.

"A lot of them did," agrees John. "That's the sort of thing that's interesting because I always thought of her as being something that made me ashamed to be English.

"But I was always impressed with her in Parliament when she was talking, say, to Neil Kinnock. She was brilliant, very quick and very funny. That was her at her best and that's what they saw all the time.

"They saw the political animal in her lair and she was shit-hot. I think their admiration came from that, rather than something that we saw, which was quite different.

"Poor old Kinnock," says John sympathetically. "I don't know how he remained head of the party for so long because he just got squashed – she pinned him down every single time."

John has no political ambitions himself: "I don't think I'd be very good," he admits.

The actor, whose many famous roles include Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant and John Merrick in The Elephant Man, has also starred as the imperious Caligula in 91Èȱ¬ TV's I, Claudius, in Midnight Express and Scandal and, more recently, in Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone.

He denies he has an ideal role: "I don't have ambitions in that sense; the problem with having ambitions is that you might achieve them, and then what would you do," he says with a throaty laugh.

"I don't know what the future holds – I just hope it's exciting.

"In terms of what I have done, I don't have any favourite. I enjoyed Quentin enormously, but it also made a difference in terms of the public and business perceptions of me as a performer, so that was probably the most important.

"But I liked lots of the characters, for example, Winston Smith from Nineteen Eighty Four, from knowing him since I was 16."

If he hadn't been an actor, John would probably have continued with his studies at St Martin's School of Art in London, where he was in the frame as a painter before winning a scholarship to RADA.

"But had I got the academic qualifications, which I never would have got because I couldn't pass maths, I would quite have enjoyed going into diplomacy – but only if I could have been an ambassador!

"My father was a bit upset because he was a double first in mathematics and engineering," he reveals. "But I think I was badly taught because I couldn't hear the teacher. And you got fed up with asking, 'Please, sir, could you say that again?'

"I think people who were like myself – who didn't have an aptitude for maths – went under; and the people who did have an aptitude, it didn't really make much difference, because they would have worked it out anyhow."

However the figures add up, though, this consummate actor is a huge plus for stage and screen.

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