Mary Beth Hurt, whose knack for standing out in supporting roles, often as a mother, wife or sister, brought her acclaim for films like “Interiors,” “The World According to Garp” and “The Age of Innocence” and more than a dozen Broadway productions, died on Saturday in Jersey City, N.J. She was 79.
In a joint statement on social media, her husband, the director Paul Schrader, and their daughter, Molly, said the death, in an assisted-living home, was from Alzheimer’s disease.
Ms. Hurt was already an established New York theater actress when she made her film debut in “Interiors” (1978), Woody Allen’s story of a trio of sisters dealing with their mother’s clinical depression.
Critics lauded her performance alongside a cast of heavyweights, including Diane Keaton, Geraldine Page, Sam Waterston and Maureen Stapleton.
“I remember the first day of shooting I was so nervous,” she told The New York Times in 1986. “But I looked down and saw that Keaton’s knees were shaking — and I immediately became calm. I thought, ‘It’s all right, everyone gets nervous.’”
Four years later, she again won praise for her work in “The World According to Garp,” George Roy Hill’s adaptation of the best-selling novel by John Irving.
She played the wife of the novelist T.S. Garp, played by Robin Williams, alongside John Lithgow and her friend Glenn Close, both of whom received Academy Award nominations for their supporting roles.
Ms. Hurt was equally known for her stage work, including on Broadway in “Trelawny of the ‘Wells,’” Arthur Wing Pinero’s romantic comedy about an actress who tries to leave the theater for the “real world”; “Crimes of the Heart,” Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about three grown daughters in a dysfunctional Mississippi family; and “Benefactors,” Michael Frayn’s drama about an architect struggling with his conscience.
She received Tony nominations for all three, and won an Obie Award for “Crimes of the Heart.”
“She has the best of the English and the best of the American traditions,” the playwright David Hare, who directed her in his play “A Secret Rupture” in 1989, told The Times that year. “And in Mary Beth’s case there is a sort of improvisatory gift, a willingness to make the performance fresh every time.”
Given her consistently strong reviews, journalists and critics often wondered why Ms. Hurt did not appear onstage and in movies more often. It was, she told them, mostly her choice.
“I like not working,” she told The Times in 1989. “I have everything I want, everything I need. And more.”
Mary Beth Supinger was born on Sept. 26, 1946, in Marshalltown, a small city in central Iowa. Her father, Forrest, was a sales engineer for a packaging company, and her mother, Delores (Andre) Supinger, managed the home.
When she was a child, Mary Beth’s babysitters included a teenage Jean Seberg, a Marshalltown native who would soon be known to the world as a leading star in French cinema, beginning with a lead role in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” (1960), opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo.
In one of her few leading roles, Ms. Hurt played Ms. Seberg (who died in 1979 at 40) in the 1995 biopic “The Journals of Jean Seberg.”
Ms. Hurt became interested in acting in high school, and studied drama at the University of Iowa. She graduated in 1968 and later studied at New York University.
During her summers she acted in regional theaters, including the Ledges, outside of Lansing, Mich. There she met a fellow young actor, William Hurt. They married in 1971 and divorced in 1982.
Ms. Hurt married Mr. Schrader in 1983. Along with him and their daughter, her survivors include their son, Sam.
Ms. Hurt made her New York stage debut in 1973 at the Public Theater in “More than You Deserve,” an antiwar rock musical in which she played a 98-year-old Vietnamese man.
As she would do many more times in her career, she stood out, even in a cast that included the singer Meat Loaf and Fred Gwynn, a veteran TV actor. The show’s producer, Joseph Papp, liked her so much that he cast her that summer as Celia in a Shakespeare in the Park production of “As You Like It.”
Ms. Hurt made her Broadway debut in 1974 in “Love for Love,” a Restoration-era comedy by the British playwright William Congreve. The production, directed by Hal Prince, starred Ms. Close, who was also making her Broadway debut, and she and Ms. Hurt became lifelong friends.
After “The World According to Garp,” Ms. Hurt appeared in supporting roles in films like “D.A.R.Y.L.” (1985), about a lifelike robot boy; “The Age of Innocence” (1993), Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel; and “Six Degrees of Separation” (1993), Fred Schepisi’s adaptation of the John Guare play.
She also appeared in three films that Mr. Schrader wrote and directed: “Light Sleeper” (1992), “Affliction” (1997) and “The Walker” (2007), as well as “Bringing Out the Dead” (1999), which he wrote and Mr. Scorsese directed.
In a 2010 interview with Theater Life, a website, Ms. Hurt said that she preferred supporting roles over leads because she found top billing intimidating — and that she liked secondary parts better, in any case.
“I found secondary parts much more interesting, especially when I was younger and the ingénue roles were pretty bland,” she said. “An ingénue character doesn’t ever think they’re an ingénue. They think they’re a person and they have idiosyncrasies. Those idiosyncrasies interested me.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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