John Hurt will again play Quentin Crisp in sequel to classic drama

John Hurt is set to reprise the role which launched him as a star more than 30 years ago. A sequel to the classic television drama, The Naked Civil Servant, based on the early memoirs of the legendary gay writer, exhibitionist and wit, Quentin Crisp, will be filmed this autumn with Hurt again in the lead role.

The original play, which showed Crisp's courageous resistance to the conventional morality of the immediate post-war decades, was first broadcast by ITV in 1975. The new play, will be set in New York in the 1980s and 1990s, where Crisp, writer, artist's model, sometime male prostitute, and self-declared "stately homo of England" had gone to live. Based on Crisp's diaries in the The New York Native magazine and on conversations with New Yorkers.

James Burstall, head of production company Leopardrama said: "He went there because he wanted to be his own man in a new city and also because he wanted to entertain and be entertained."