Mary Beth Hurt, a Tony Award-nominated actor who appeared in films including “Interiors,” “The World According to Garp” and “The Age of Innocence,” has died. She was 79.
Hurt died Saturday of Alzheimer’s disease, her daughter Molly Schrader announced Sunday in an Instagram post. Hurt’s husband, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Paul Schrader, confirmed to the Hollywood Reporter that she died at an assisted living facility in Jersey City, N.J.. She had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2015.
“She was an actress, a wife, a sister, a mother, an aunt, a friend, and she took on all those rolls with grace and a kind ferocity,” Molly Schrader wrote in her post. “Although we’re grieving there is some comfort in knowing she is no longer suffering and is reunited with her sisters in peace.”
Hurt made her New York stage debut in a 1973 in an off-Broadway production of “As You Like It,” according to Playbill. She made her Broadway debut in 1974, appearing in brief productions of “Love for Love” and “The Rules of the Game.” She appeared in 15 Broadway productions total over the course of her career.
While Hurt told the New York Times in 1989 that she was pleased with her career, she also said that “there’s not too much reward” for doing theater in New York.
“You can’t make a living doing it,” she told the outlet. “I am happy with my career, but it’s very hard to maintain. I don’t sing. I can’t do musicals. The only way I can make a living doing theater is on Broadway. And it’s a terrible situation. There aren’t many straight plays on Broadway. And Broadway needs straight plays. They provide a special voice that shouldn’t be stilled.”
She earned her first Tony Award nomination in 1976 for portraying Rose Trelawny in Arthur Wing Pinero’s “Trelawny of the ‘Wells.’” Hurt’s two other nominations were for her roles in Beth Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart” (1982) and Michael Frayn’s “Benefactors” (1986).
Hurt made her film debut in Woody Allen’s 1978 drama, “Interiors,” where she portrayed the directionless would-be artist Joey opposite her more successful siblings Renata and Flyn, played by Diane Keaton and Kristin Griffith, respectively. Her performance earned her a BAFTA nomination.
In “The World According to Garp” (1982), Hurt played Helen Holm, the eventual wife of Robin Williams’ titular T.S. Garp. She also appeared in Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” (1993) and her husband Paul Schrader’s “Light Sleeper” (1992) and “Affliction” (1997).
Born Mary Beth Supinger in Marshalltown, Iowa, on Sept. 25, 1946, Hurt studied drama at the University of Iowa before pursuing graduate studies at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. She married actor William Hurt in 1971 and took his name before they divorced in 1982. She married Schrader, whom she met through a publicist, in 1983.
“Mary Beth saved me,” Schrader, who has been open about his trouble with drugs and alcohol in the 1980s, told the New Yorker in 2023. After moving her to a care facility in 2019 following her Alzheimer’s diagnosis, Schrader moved Hurt during the pandemic back to their New York lake house, where he’d built her a greenhouse because she loved gardening.
One of Hurt’s childhood babysitters was fellow Marshalltown native Jean Seberg, a family acquaintance who would go on to star in films such as Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” and Otto Preminger’s “St. Joan” before her tragic death in 1979. Hurt played Seberg, in voiceover, in Mark Rappaport’s “From the Journals of Jean Seberg” (1995).
David Hare, who directed Hurt in “The Secret Rapture,” described her as “a fine ensemble actress” to the New York Times in 1989.
“She has the best of the English and the best of the American traditions,” Hare told the outlet. “What marks English actors is that they can turn on a sixpence — there isn’t anything technically they can’t do. They’re supple, like musicians, and from the technical facility they acquire freedom. And in Mary Beth’s case there is a sort of improvisatory gift, a willingness to make the performance fresh every time.”
Hurt is survived by her husband and two children, Molly and Sam.
