Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort in 1971’s Harold and Maude.
Courtesy of Everett Collection
Bud Cort, the co-star of Harold Ashby’s black comedy classic Harold and Maude, has died. He was 77 years of age.
Cort died on Wednesday, Feb. 11, in Connecticut after a long illness, friend and producer Dorian Hannaway told The Hollywood Reporter. “Bud Cort was a savant at acting, at theater, and he was blessed with a passion for this as a young man as he loved art,” Hannaway recalled.
She added that Cort used to cut school to see live theater matinees of Funny Girl, starring Barbara Streisand, in the 1960s. “He would hang out at the stage door with Barbara’s sister Roslyn Kind. He would go to every performance he could. He just loved the theater. He wanted to be that creative person from the time he was a child,” Hannaway recounted.
Cort, born Walter Edward Cox on March 29, 1948, in New Rochelle, New York, attended NYU Tisch School of the Arts for a brief period and studied acting with Stella Adler before going professional as a performer.
His breakout role came when director Robert Altman cast Cort in a supporting role in M*A*S*H, before he offered him a lead role in Brewster McCloud. That led to a co-starring role as Harold in the dark comedy Harold and Maude, opposite Ruth Gordon as Maude.
Cort said of that role in a 2012 interview with the online publication Trainwreck’d Society: “As I was reading the script I immediately knew it was going to be a classic film for the ages. There was no denying it. The studio was stumped on how to publicize it. The art for newspapers and theater posters was plain black, block lettering on an empty background; it was more appropriate for The Ten Commandments! Truthfully, it’s success came from the people. The ground swell of word of mouth dropkicked it over so many goalposts both here and abroad- that Paramount had to re-release it.”
Subsequent movie roles for Cort included Electric Dreams, Pollock, Dogma and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. And he made TV appearances on shows like Ugly Betty, Criminal Minds and Arrested Development.
Cort also did voice work, including as the Toyman in Superman: The Animated Series and other series in the DC animated universe. In 1979, Cort survived a major car crash in Los Angeles in which he was seriously injured.
His work in film and theater continued, however, and led him to co-found the LA Classic Theatre Works with Richard Dreyfuss and Rene Auberjonois.
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