Looks like another awful year for celebrity deaths: not only Mary Tyler Moore and Barbara Hale, but the great John Hurt. The venerable star of so many classics - A Man for All Seasons, Alien, The Elephant Man and I, Claudius among them - passed away after a long fight with pancreatic cancer.It's difficult to pick a favorite role, and if nothing else Hurt earned cinematic immortality for an endless gallery of death scenes, but I'll always remember his turn as Timothy Evans in Richard Fleischer's 10 Rillington Place. A Welshman framed for murder by serial killer John Reginald Christie, he's endearingly confused and easily hurt by Christie's machinations, his mental state compounding the tragedy. Hurt's plaintive bleat of "Christie done it!" after realizing what's happened is nothing short of heart-rending.
