Bud Cort, whose performance as a troubled young man who finds unexpected love with a 79-year-old free spirit in “Harold and Maude” helped turn the 1971 film into an enduring cult classic, died Wednesday morning in Norwalk, Conn., after a long illness. He was 77.
His death was confirmed by Cort’s longtime friend Dorian Hannaway, who first met the actor in 1978.
Born Walter Edward Cox on March 29, 1948, in Rye, N.Y., Cort adopted his professional name early in his career, having fallen in love with the theater. After earning small roles on a few TV series, he was discovered by director Robert Altman while performing in a nightclub comedy act and cast as Pvt. Boone in the director’s hit 1970 anti-war satire “M*A*S*H.” That same year, Altman also gave him the title role in his “Brewster McCloud,” an eccentric fable about a Houston loner determined to build a pair of wings and take flight.
Cort’s defining role came the following year in director Hal Ashby’s “Harold and Maude.” As Harold Parker Chasen, a wealthy, death-obsessed young man fixated on staging elaborate mock suicides, Cort brought a wounded, wide-eyed earnestness that gradually softened into wonder as his Harold falls in love with Maude, a feisty, life-affirming Holocaust survivor played by Ruth Gordon, then a recent Oscar winner for “Rosemary’s Baby.” The film was not a major success on its initial release but steadily grew into a midnight-movie favorite and international cult touchstone. Cort received Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for the performance.
The role both launched and complicated his career. “I was typecast to the point where I didn’t make a film for five years after ‘Harold and Maude,’” Cort told The Times in 1996. “I only worked in theater where I was not typecast.”
The film, he said, “was a blessing and a curse. It closed a lot of doors in terms of my development as an actor, but on the other hand, it gave me the cachet to walk in a lot more doors than I would have been able to had I not made it.”
Cort resisted roles that leaned too heavily into eccentricity, rejecting a part, to his later regret, in the 1975 Oscar winner “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” “I should have done everything that I was offered,” he said. “But I didn’t want to be [a character type like] Tony Perkins, Maynard Krebs or Peter Lorre.”
His career was further interrupted in 1979 when he was severely injured in a car crash on the Hollywood Freeway, suffering fractures and serious facial injuries that required multiple plastic surgeries. The accident disrupted his work for years.
Cort later reemerged as a distinctive supporting presence in film and television. He voiced a sentient computer in “Electric Dreams” (1984), appeared in Michael Mann’s “Heat” (1995) as an exploitative diner manager and played a homeless man revealed to be God in Kevin Smith’s “Dogma” (1999). He portrayed art patron Howard Putzel in “Pollock” (2000) and was part of the ensemble cast of Wes Anderson’s “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” (2004). In 1991, Cort directed, co-wrote (with former Times writer Paul Ciotti) and starred in “Ted & Venus,” a low-budget romance about a Venice Beach poet.
On television and in animation, he voiced Toyman across multiple DC series and appeared in projects including “And the Band Played On,” “Ugly Betty” and “Criminal Minds.”
Looking back on his life, Cort described acting less as a career choice than an inevitability. “I don’t know if I believe in past lives or not,” he told The Times. “I don’t think I do. But whatever my past was, I was an actor.”
He is survived by his brother Joseph Cox and his sister-in-law Vickie and their daughters, Meave, Brytnn, and Jesse of Rye, N.Y.; his sister Kerry Cox of Larchmont, N.Y.; his sister and brother-in-law, Tracy Cox Berkman and Edward Berkman, and their sons, Daniel and Peter. He is also survived by his sister, Shelly Cox Dufour and brother-in-law Robert Dufour, and nieces Madeline and Lucie.
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