Bud Cort Has Died

[+ Lucky]

He starred as Harold in Harold and Maude. I loved the film, but he had a long career in the movie industry.

Bud Cort, a veteran stage and screen actor whose best-known role was one of his first, playing a death-obsessed, 19-year-old recluse named Harold opposite Ruth Gordon’s 79-year-old, happy-go-lucky Holocaust survivor named Maude in the 1971 off-kilter romantic comedy “Harold and Maude,” died on Wednesday in Norwalk, Conn. He was 77.

A representative for his family said that the death, at an assisted-living facility, was from complications from pneumonia.

Mr. Cort appeared in more than 40 movies, dozens of TV shows and countless theater productions, but even late in life he was often recognized on the street for a single role: that of Harold Chasen, a precocious, morose rich teenager who falls into friendship, and then love, with Maude Chardin, who lives in an abandoned railroad car and is old enough to be his grandmother.

The film, directed by Hal Ashby, is by turns humorous, touching and melancholic; late in the film, Harold sees a tattoo on Maude’s arm, left over from her time in a Nazi concentration camp.

 

 

Though initially a critical and commercial flop — Variety said that it “has all the fun and gaiety of a burning orphanage” — through the 1970s it developed a cult following, especially on college campuses, where its quirky, anti-establishment sensibility hit home in the post-hippie era.

 

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Mr. Cort with Ruth Gordon in a scene from “Harold and Maude.” The movie’s quirky, anti-establishment sensibility hit home in the post-hippie era of the 1970s.Credit...Paramount Pictures

Today it is widely considered one of the best films of the 1970s. In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked it No. 9 in its list of best romantic comedies.

Mr. Cort got his first break a few years before “Harold and Maude,” when the director Robert Altman saw him doing stand-up comedy in Manhattan and cast him in a small part in his 1970 Korean War comedy “M*A*S*H.”

 

 

Mr. Altman liked Mr. Cort’s acting enough that he immediately gave him the title role in his next film, “Brewster McCloud,” which came out later that same year. In that movie, which also starred Shelley Duvall, Mr. Cort played a flight-obsessed boy who lives in a shelter under the Houston Astrodome and becomes a suspect in a series of bird-dropping-related deaths.

 

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Mr. Cort with Shelley Duvall in Robert Altman’s “Brewster McCloud.” Mr. Cort, who had complained about not getting lead roles in films, landed the title role.Credit...Everett Collection

The film did poorly among critics and moviegoers, but it caught the attention of Mr. Ashby, who was casting for his upcoming film about an extremely dark May-December romance between a similarly introverted young man and a much, much older woman.

Mr. Cort was 21 when he played the part of Harold with wry confidence; many of his most memorable moments, like a fourth-wall-breaking smile into the camera, were his idea.

 

 

But the film that made him famous also made him something of an outcast.

He fought with the studio, Paramount, over edits, leading it to exclude him from much of the film’s publicity. He was later typecast as a character actor and offered only offbeat roles when he believed he deserved to play the lead.

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He said that Milos Forman considered him for a supporting part in his 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” but that he lost his chance when he insisted that he get the lead. That part, Randle McMurphy, went to Jack Nicholson, who won an Oscar.

 

 

By his own account, Mr. Cort spent much of the 1970s depressed and out of film work, getting by with stage roles. For a time, he lived in the guest cottage at the Los Angeles home of Groucho Marx, with whom he became close friends. When Mr. Marx lost a tooth, he gave it to Mr. Cort as a gift.

Mr. Cort had bit parts in several movies, including “Pumping Iron” (1977), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, from which his only scene was ultimately cut.

In 1979, he played the lead in “Son of Hitler,” about an illiterate woodworker who is thought to be the son of the Nazi dictator. It did not do well at the box office.

That same year, Mr. Cort was in a car accident that left him with broken bones and a disfigured face. Much of the money he had earned from acting went to plastic surgeries.

He was back to acting by the mid-1980s but mostly in single episodes in TV series like “Columbo,” a reboot of “The Twilight Zone” and the comedy-drama “Ugly Betty.” He also had minor parts in movies like the crime thriller “Heat” (1995), which starred Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, and the Bill Murray comedy “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” (2004).

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/movies/bud-cort-dead.html

 

[Becket]

Harold and Maude is in my top ten movies all time. It is funny, warm, and thought provoking. First time I saw it was at college. They would show off beat films and cult classics some Friday nights in the Student Union. I had no idea what it was but it was a Friday and I didn't have a date. So I sat down with a hundred or so of my fellow classmates, expecting only to kill  a couple hours while watching yet another strange and never heard of movie.

I laughed so hard. To this day I remember so many of the strange yet hilarious lines:  "Do you ENJOY knives?"     "Harold!  That was your last date!"    "It's not unusual for a young man to want to sleep with his mother. What I don't understand is why you want to sleep with your grandmother."

I remember seeing the movie being kinda depressed and overwhelmed about one thing or another. Two hours listening to Ruth Gordon as Maude, and I came out with a sense of hope and gratitude. 

I never saw Bud Cort in any other film. Hope he had a good life. RIP.